Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/247

Rh There is a truth in these last remarks which deserves from educators a great deal more serious attention than it has yet received. No one will deny that our spelling is irrational; and, if so, just to that degree the art of spelling is an irrational practice; that is, it is a practice which, in the first place, calls for no exercise of the reasoning faculty; and, second, it is an exercise which continually violates the dictates of reason. The pupil who should spell a word as reason dictates would be flogged, or in some other way disgraced before the school. On the other hand, the pupil that can bring his mind into the most perfect harmony with an irrational system, can go on perpetrating absurdities the longest without failing, wins prizes and applause. This certainly cannot conduce to good mental habits. The child is born into a world of real objects and relations, and the mind grows through experience in acquiring ideas of these actual things. Discrimination, comparison, inference, reasoning, judgment, are all elements of early mental activity, and, in fact, constitute the intellect. Mental growth consists essentially in strengthening and extending these operations on newly-acquired and newly-combined ideas. These rudimentary processes of the infantine intellect are of exactly the same nature as the perfected processes of scientific and philosophic intellects; and it is the true office of education to lead them out, or guide their unfolding from lower to higher states. Written language must be called in at an early stage, as an indispensable help in this upward progress. Yet, such is the imperfect character of this new instrument, and such the bungling of many who teach its use, that the child is quite as apt to be hindered and stopped by it, in its mental course, as helped on. Nay, when we remember that this is the most critical stage of mental unfolding the taking of the child out of Nature,—as far as that can be done, and immersing it in the school where irrational mental practices are arbitrarily enforced—it is no exaggeration to say that more mind is extinguished than is led out, and that the school-room is as liable to become a mental slaughter-house of the innocents as a place of healthy education. When a child enters school, there should be no break in its earlier mental unfolding; but this is just what generally occurs. Instead of going on with its normal mental exercises, it is turned off into artificial mental exercises. Instead of still employing its thought mainly upon the properties and relations of things, symbols are substituted for things, and the whole action of the mind becomes a manipulation of symbols. The memory is not only loaded with verbal signs, but these are arbitrary and contradictory; and an accuracy is exacted in retaining them which consumes an immense proportion of the time, and, after working great mental mischief, generally ends in failure. Tolerable spelling is, of course, an important thing, but we do not believe in dwarfing or stupefying the mind to gain it. Let it be taught incidentally, and in subordination to the regular exercise of the higher faculties, and the end will be better served than by trying to make it the prime accomplishment of education. Perhaps, in regard to so fundamental a reform, but little is to be expected from the present generation of teachers; but, happily for the hopes of humanity, there is an arrangement by which the present generation of teachers is destined to be taken out of the way.



author of this book is quite widely known by his former publication, "Hereditary Genius," and by various statistical 