Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/756

684 the essential principle of memory; and it is particularly applicable to the automatic memory, upon which, as already said in substance, the teaching of the symbolic subjects must depend. The object is to have thought spontaneously suggested by symbols, with no conscious attention upon the symbols themselves; and, of course, there is the co-ordinate purpose to acquire power to use the means of expression automatically to convey thought. Neither of these objects may be secured if the learning of forms is divorced from their constant use in the ready acquisition and clear conveyance of thought; which, when applied to the work of the schoolroom, means that the study of arithmetic, language, grammar, or the mechanics of reading, writing, and drawing, apart from their natural connections with the pursuit of the content subjects, history, literature, science, and geography is a mistake. Common sense maintains, in everyday life at least, that the mechanism necessary to the performance of any art may be most advantageously acquired through actual practice of the art; and one never learns the mechanics of bicycle-riding, baseball playing, typewriting, and similar arts before he begins to ride the bicycle, play ball, or use the typewriter; but he acquires skill in doing these things by applying himself to their execution at the outset. A child at its mother's knee learns to talk by talking, and to walk by walking, rather than in either case to acquire beforehand the theory and mechanics of each in the hope to apply them some time later in life. But common sense, which has always been slow in carrying its philosophy of the activities of daily life into the work of the schoolroom, is just now beginning it seems to appreciate in a way that what is true concerning the mastery of the mechanics of doing things in daily life applies also to the formal subjects of education, in the sense that they may be most serviceably acquired in an incidental manner, while using them, continually to acquire and express thought aroused by the study of real things. It is, no doubt, necessary to have much drill upon these formal things to make their use automatic; but this drill must follow and depend upon the use of the symbolic subjects in the study of the real subjects at any time rather than to aim at mastering a body of forms which may be applied at some future period.

From the foregoing (and there are other arguments, such as the greater interest which the pupil will have in the study of the formal subjects when they are thus connected with the real subjects, which can not be entered into here) it may be concluded that the formal branches of instruction acquire a value from their connection with the study of content subject-matter; and taught by themselves they are, comparatively speaking, empty and valueless. What has been said of the symbolic studies may