Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/810

786 I believe that this sentiment study of the English language should be the foundation stone of modern education. In a smaller measure, but in the same spirit, a modern foreign language may be taken up and entered into and possessed, and especially if but one be taken up at a time. I have omitted spelling, writing, and geography from this new curriculum, because they are better taught as involved in the other work. Spelling at best is a mechanical virtue. I happen myself to be a good speller, but the hours I spent with the spelling-book were numbered. I have learned to spell because much reading has familiarized me with the appearance of words, and I happen to have a visual type of memory. I recognize words now much as I do maple or oak leaves, and with as little difficulty. I am disposed to think that the testimony of others would be similar to mine. In the same way it is hardly worth while to have a separate copy book when all the written language work should be an exercise in writing, or a separate atlas when all reading involving places is done in the presence of a large map. This is what I mean by cutting out studies that are better taught by implication. And in defense of this suggestion, I would call your attention to the fact that the best things of life—courtesy and morality and taste and religion—are not formalized. They are taught by implication and by example.

The science work offers another fine chance for correlation. It should be thoroughly of the surface, and should have to do with the tangible things that interest children, plants and animals and stones, as they touch human life. No skeletons, no systems, no schemes of classification, but flesh and blood and realities all the time. The fatal blight on nearly all elementary pedagogical work is our passion for systematizing, a passion doomed to disappointment, and the forerunner of many dreary failures. One can only classify when one has a lot of material. The children haven't this. They must first get it. The quest will occupy them at least up to the high school. The science work had much better begin with some observational and in a large way experimental branch, such as physiography. Physiology is not superficial enough, and can not be well taught in the absence of an elementary knowledge of physics and chemistry.

The drawing, which I would have entirely free hand, is most valuable when used as a means for the expression of the child's own ideas. Let him draw what he likes, and let the teacher help merely in the method of representation, and then chiefly by suggestion. But these ideas, I am glad to say, are already being worked out in some of our schools. You may have seen the curious pictures that children make of soldiers marching, or of a ball game, or you may have been amazed at their original conceptions of animals and