Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/786

766 men were born and how their names were accented; and that it is better to go and visit one range of mountains or large city than to learn by staring at a map where all the cities and mountains are.

Our prevailing eye-mindedness is further shown by the readiness with which the mind is impressed through the eye, and the ease with which visual images are retained. A teacher, wishing to impress some essential point, illustrates or even writes the same upon the blackboard. A child who has been told a hundred times, without result, to correct some fault, finally learns the new way at once when presented to him by sight or touch. In physics, mechanics, and mathematics the so-called "graphic method" is used more and more. When other forms of illustration fail, we fall back upon the visible curve. The sociologist lays down his abscissas and ordinates and illustrates to the eye by curves the relation of the increase of crime to the scarcity of corn. Many teachers believe that the pedagogical discovery of our age is that it is easier to impress the mind through the eye than through the ear. This is undoubtedly true, and such teaching is successful, if by success is meant the mere imparting of instruction, so that it is understood and retained. In every subject the blackboard is freely used, and in many has become indispensable. The old-fashioned mental arithmetic has given place to the so-called "practical" arithmetic, a name which seems to be a misnomer, since the student of it is, for the rest of his life, committed to the use of pencil and paper for any mathematical computation higher than the multiplication table. Grammar even is taught by diagrams, and logic by circles. Blackboards, maps, and charts cover the walls of our school-rooms; globes, figures, models, chemical and physical apparatus, cover the tables. This constant appeal to the eye, prevails not only in our intermediate schools but also in our Kindergartens and in our colleges. In the former, instruction is by object-lessons. Excepting some exercise in singing, all the instruction is in form and color and in manual training. The student thus trained with respect to his eye and hand from the primary to the high school, selects, when he enters college, subjects for which he is best prepared. These are the material sciences and arts with their experimental laboratories, and their visible and tangible material and apparatus. In our colleges and universities, therefore, we notice the yearly increasing prominence given to the material sciences and to branches of technology, and the crowding out of the time-honored humanistic studies. These so-called "liberal arts," studied for subjective culture rather than for objective utilities, have, during the whole history of education, figured as the central and principal group of studies in higher education, and still do so to