Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/17

Rh stages of all studies whatever. The child, as well as the man, is linguist, student of science, artist, philosopher, moralist, poet, though his philology, science, art, philosophy, will be childish, not manly, germs and intuitions, not results of developed reason. Is it not obvious that in this view elementary schools become something far more than places for drilling the youthful mind in the use of the mere tools of knowledge? Is it not obvious, moreover, that, looked at from this point of view, a man's profession is only the outgrowth and fruitful consummation of his whole training; a divergence, when the time arrives that the whole of knowledge becomes too wide a field to cultivate, into some special fruit-bearing direction, which, whatever it may be, will lead to a truly liberal profession, inasmuch as by a man so trained his calling cannot but be followed in a liberal spirit?

We have in England and America no conception of what may be accomplished in the early stages of education, because we have been, to so great an extent, adherents of the grindstone-theory. "Nowhere," says Mr. Joseph Payne, commenting on the lamentable, almost ludicrous, failure of that embodiment of the grindstone-theory, applied to popular teaching through the medium, not of the Latin grammar, but of the three R's—I mean the so-called English "Revised Code"—"nowhere have I ever met, in the course of long practice and study in teaching, with a more striking illustration of the great truth that, just in proportion as you substitute mechanical routine for intelligent and sympathetic development of the child's powers, you shall fail in the object you are aiming at." I think that the insignificant results of our present elementary schools, as compared with the amount of time, thought, and money, expended on them, and their want of real vitality, are to be mainly traced to this fundamentally false conception of elementary teaching as concerned only with the acquisition of the mere tools of knowledge. By its fruits, or rather by its