Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/498

492 idea as constantly as possible in view, and not to distract the ardent mind with purposeless and disconnected scraps of learning.

I ask you to bear this distinction in mind, for it is a principle which may guide us in differentiating university methods from school methods of education.

The distinction need not involve us in a discussion of the "Ziel-Angabe" in elementary education, for that is rather a question of keeping the interest alive during each lesson than of maintaining a permanent purpose in view throughout a course.

The much-discussed heuristic method as applied to very young children does, no doubt, fulfil this object so far as it provides the inquisitive mind with novelty instead of a set task, but so far as it makes the purpose more prominent than the process it may become a method more suited to the adolescent or the adult mind than to that of the young child.

I can fully realize that a most difficult and anxious time for the teacher must be that of the maturing intellect, in the interval between childhood and the close of the school career, when the method and spirit of the teaching must to some extent gradually change with the changing mental characteristics of the pupil. But, whatever may be the right methods of teaching children of ten and young men and women of twenty, many of our failures are due to one or both of two prevalent mistakes: the first, the mistake of teaching children by methods that are too advanced; the second, that of teaching university students by methods that are better adapted for school children. It is with the latter that I wish to deal in this address; but we may in passing remind ourselves that when young men and young women are sent straight from the university to teach children with nothing but their university experience to guide them, it is not surprising that they often proceed at first on wrong lines and as though they were dealing with university students.

The difficulty of divesting oneself of the mental attitude and the form of expression familiar in university circles, if one is to become intelligible even to the higher classes in a school, is betrayed by the unsatisfactory nature of many of the papers set by university examiners to school children. The teachers complain, and rightly complain, that there is often an academic style and form about them which just make them entirely unsuitable for the child.

It is, of course, hopeful that a diploma in pedagogy or some evidence that they have received instruction in method is now generally required of those who are to become teachers in schools. It seems to me, however, somewhat curious that, while efforts are now being made to give instruction in educational method to such persons, no similar effort is made to give instruction in more advanced methods to those who are called upon at the close of their undergraduate career to become