Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/540

522 with tiresome iteration, but seldom is a question raised about the value of the ideas taught. Do the charts and books for primaries express aught that is unfamiliar to children? Rather do they not contend for the merit of expressing most completely the commonplaces of child-life? Is there anything worthy to be called thinking or capable of arousing interest and emotion in memorizing combinations of symbols, and associating them with familiar and trivial ideas? And let us see what "object-lessons" chiefly deal with. Last year, in a normal school of the Empire State, a teacher of primary methods, proudly claimed by her principal to be the best in the State, gave thimbles, scissors, chairs, etc., as suitable subjects for object-lessons, and carefully led her pupils through the steps required to develop in children's minds ideas of the parts and the uses of these objects. Is there one child in five hundred, at six years of age, ignorant of these parts and uses? Then the so-called development process is a farce, and a waste of time and energy. Look over manuals of object-lessons and courses of study for primary children: you will usually find but few subjects leading the child from the beaten path of his daily life into new, inviting, and fruitful fields; and of these, note the directions as to what is to be taught. Such directions often resemble a lesson on a butterfly that I heard given by a kindergartner. With a single butterfly held in her hand she led the children to speak of its flying in the sunshine, sipping food from flowers, living through the summer, and of the beauty of its colors. Not a word was said of the three parts of the body, the two pairs of wings, the six legs, the antennæ, and the tube through which it sips food—all of which and more the children could easily have been led to see. Doubtless the teacher thought the children had had a beautiful lesson; but had they received anything at all? Although city children, they spent the summer in the country—they had all seen and probably chased several species of butterflies, and possibly some of them knew more than their teacher about the habits of butterflies.

Think of children gathered by fifties in thousands of schoolrooms, spending the first years of school-life in repeating trivial facts and ideas that have been familiar from babyhood; in learning the symbols for these ideas, and in counting beans and bits of chalk! The five-year-old boy who described a kindergarten as "the place where they are always pretending to do something and never doing it," and the eight-year-old girl who, after reading the first few paragraphs of some ordinary primary reading matter, looked up at her teacher and said, "I think these sentences are very silly, don't you?" are not alone in preferring the lessons of the street and the field to those of the school-room. In such dealing with trite ideas the child gets little mental exercise, gets