Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/232

220, every effort should be made to strengthen the body, and definite teaching should begin later than with a robust child. It is most foolish to cram the head of a backward child with phrases it can not understand—at most it can but learn parrot-fashion, and such a proceeding is about as senseless as loading a delicate stomach with indigestible food. If a child has an appetite for its bodily food, it can digest, and the same rule holds good for mental food. There is no use in cramming it down if the appetite for knowledge be not there.

All teaching should proceed from the concrete to the abstract, though the reverse method is generally employed. Arithmetic, for instance, should at first be taught from objects, and not by names and figures which are mere symbols and abstractions, and most difficult for the minds of children to grasp. The relative value of different kinds of money may be easily learned by quite young children, merely by letting them play at shop with real money. At the same time they are unconsciously learning both addition and subtraction. Weights and measures should be learned in the same way, and they will be far better impressed on the memory than by merely learning the tables of weights and measures in an arithmetic book.

Again, with languages—rules of grammar should be learned last of all; a language is formed long before any rules for speaking it are formulated. The rules of grammar are only the recorded observations of what I may call the habits of a language. Every child should learn a new language as it learns its own, by talking it, looking at picture books and learning nursery rhymes, and the language will have some chance of developing naturally and easily, and of being retained for use in after-life. As languages are usually taught in schools, they are of no value beyond that of mental gymnastics, and when the school life is over all the rules and exercises, learned with so much weariness and disgust, slip from the memory, from having made no impression on the mind.

If the child has a natural bent in some particular direction, this should be encouraged as early as possible. I think, as a rule, children are taught far too many things. Who does not know of girls who, with no ear for music, are forced daily to undergo the drudgery of practicing, merely because it is the proper thing for girls to play, at any rate a little? Many persons will be terribly alarmed at the suggestion that science is one of those things all children should be taught. The word science suggests to them all that is dry, cold, difficult, and unromantic—why, I can not tell, for the word itself only means knowledge, and children find anything acceptable and interesting that will answer their numerous questions concerning all around them, and far from being dry and unromantic. "Science," to use the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer,