Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/341

Rh Nature; for the learning of the mother-tongue is so easy that it is acquired without any hesitation. Besides, this rapid progress leaves the student time for other studies.

Pupils who study alone are limited to written language, but with a master the spoken language may be entered upon by means of exercises in listening. By attention to the reading of the master, the art of understanding foreign speech is acquired even more rapidly than the art of reading; because the elements of language being very limited, they are frequently revived, and the association of the pronunciation with the written word is easily made. In this way an adult would be able in a year or eighteen months, in his own country, without ennui or effort, to learn to understand the written or spoken language as perfectly as the foreigners themselves; but never in the same circumstances would he be able to speak it as they do.

Children, by this rational method, could early learn a living language, and be in full possession of these two arts, which would serve conjointly with the mother-tongue in their other studies. As to the arts of speaking and writing, they cannot hasten acquisition, and they will be forgotten long before there is occasion to use them. Direct reading, on the contrary, far from being forgotten, will become by practice a habit of the mind, and, when the pupils leave the Lyceum, their knowledge of English and German will be powerful auxiliaries in the other careers to which they are destined, and they will be able through life, by the aid of the periodic press and new publications, to keep acquainted with all that is published by neighboring people.

The little time and expense involved in learning to read a foreign language, by means of translations on the opposite page, as well as the facility with which it is done, will be sufficient motives to make it an object of the higher primary instruction. Peasants need neither to listen, to speak, nor to write a foreign language; reading alone suffices them. The reading aloud of the mother-tongue, taught to children in the primary schools, without stimulating the curiosity or developing the taste for reading, leaves them all their lives with intelligence as limited, and in an ignorance as profound, as if they could not read at all. Such varied and extended reading as this method proposes, creates a taste for reading, and a desire to understand, without which the art of reading is worthless.

—The twofold talent of reading and understanding, the most important in international relations, may be acquired by the humblest; since the first can be learned without a master, and the second requires only the services of a reader for a few weeks. Their acquisition is so easy and so rapid, when their study is taken out of the grooves of routine, that a pupil would be able, without neglecting any of the usual studies, to learn and understand half a dozen languages in less time than it would take to learn to speak and write a single one easily and correctly. It is so