Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/495

Rh All the faculties are subject to this law. Thus, persons in whom the ear, exercised in melody, distinguishes the most delicate tones in music, are not those who best seize the pronunciation of language. The eye exercised in colors does not better appreciate form and distance; and reciprocally.

Again, the development of the intellectual faculties is always conformed to the kind of exercise which produced it. Those who have learned much by heart, learn easily by heart; but they are not in consequence better able to recall facts, dates, localities, forms of objects, subjects of discourse, the details of a profession—nothing, in fact, which is useful for the exigencies of active life. It is to falsify Nature to ask from the memory of words that which can alone be given by the memory of things.

All the time spent by a child in learning its lessons by heart is lost, as far as concerns the exercise of judgment and the practice of language. In a class, the great majority of pupils remain idle while waiting their turn of examination. As to the master, what does he do? He does not instruct. Whatever he knows, his knowledge is a dead page for his pupils. He who, in his teaching, does not go beyond the contents of the book is unworthy to be a teacher.

It is with mnemonic lessons as with other useless drudgery imposed on the young, which, without profit, puts their intelligence to torture. All these preparatory exercises end in nothing practical. They only retard the acquisition of direct reading. If the employment of these diverse processes continues in our lyceums, they will give no better results than they have given in the past, with professors probably as clever, as zealous, as anxious to do well as their successors.

—We would not object to the length of time spent in classical study, as we have hitherto had a right to d, if the pupils, giving not more than eighteen months or two years to acquire that which alone is useful in the ancient languages, the art of reading them, derive advantage from them during the remainder of their school-life, however long it may be, in cultivating their minds, and extending their knowledge of the national idiom. Unhappily, this is not the policy in public instruction. As regards the living languages, students leave the lyceum, for the most part, without having attained any of the objects of study. They are persuaded that they have nothing to learn, when they know by heart all the rules of grammar, have written all the themes they contain, and learned a volume of dialogues; when they commence to translate fluently, to read aloud good or bad, and to make correctly grammatical and logical analyses. However, nothing of all this is really the practice of language. Nothing of all this finds its application in the commerce of life. They know the language by rule, which means, in most cases, that they can neither read, nor understand, nor speak, nor write it.

It is particularly in the study of classics that routine is pernicious