Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/196

184 they never recover. That many of our most independent and clearheaded educators themselves express so much dissatisfaction with the working and results of our schools, affords evidence that something is wrong in the present system. As we contemplate the great improvements made in education for the last thirty or forty years, and are surprised that educators were content to tolerate the state of things then existing, so will the next generation, when still greater and more radical changes shall have been introduced, look back with astonishment at this generation, and wonder that it was so well satisfied with its own methods. When our educators become thoroughly convinced that physical development as a part of education is an absolute necessity—that a strict observance of the laws of physiology and hygiene is indispensable to the highest mental culture—then we shall have vital and radical changes in our educational system; then the brain will not be cultivated so much at the expense of the body, neither will the nervous temperament be so unduly developed in proportion to other parts of the system, now so often bringing on a train of neuralgic diseases which cannot easily be cured, and exposing the individual to the keenest and most intense suffering which all the advantages of mental culture fail, not unfrequently, to compensate.

The more this whole subject is investigated, the more reason we shall find for making allowances or some distinction in scholastic discipline with reference to the differences in organization of children, and for adapting the hours of confinement and recreation, the ventilation and temperature of school-rooms, the number and kinds of studies, the modes of teaching, etc., to the laws of the physical system. But another and still more important change must take place. Some time—may that time be not far distant!—there will be a correct and established system of mental science, based upon physiological laws; and, until this era arrives, the modes and methods of education must remain incomplete and unsatisfactory. The principles of this science, in the very nature of things, must rest upon a correct knowledge of the laws and functions of the brain; and, until these are correctly understood and reduced to a general system, all education must be more or less partial, imperfect, and empirical. While the old theories of metaphysicians are very generally discarded, they still have practically a powerful influence in directing and shaping our educational systems and institutions. In the selection and arrangement of studies very little attention is paid to the peculiar nature or operations of the various faculties of the mind, or the distinct laws that govern their development and uses. For illustration, instead of educing, drawing out and training, all the mental faculties in their natural order and in harmony, each in proportion to its nature or importance, the memory is almost the only faculty appealed to in every stage of education; and this is so crammed and so stuffed that frequently but little of the knowledge obtained can be used advantageously. Instead of developing the