Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/510

506 reason about simple things we must be quite sure that they really are simple to him, that he understands them. For example, many educationists say that the study of geometry is just right for a boy. Well, yes, for five per cent, of all boys, boys who can take in abstract ideas. They take to Euclid as a duck takes to water. But for the other ninety-five per cent, geometry is very hurtful, because unless they continually experiment with rulers and compasses they do not understand what the reasoning is about. In ancient times only very old and exceptionally clever men were allowed to study geometry. We now assume that it ought to be an easy study for the average English boy. Generation after generation we stupefy the average English boy with demonstrative geometry, and we call him a duffer so often that he thinks himself a duffer, and even his mother thinks him a duffer, and, indeed, we have done our best with geometry and Latin to make him a duffer. Only for his football and cricket, which teach him to reason a little, he would become a duffer. And yet in my opinion if this average boy were properly taught in school he would prove to be very superior to the boy who is usually called clever. The schoolmaster calls a boy clever because he is exactly like what the schoolmaster himself was when a boy; but I am afraid that I place little value on the schoolmaster's cleverness, whether as a boy or a man. Reasoning can be taught through almost anything that a boy does, but more than all things through his experiments in natural science. Formal lessons on reasoning, on logic, are utterly useless, and I may say that set lessons on almost any subject are utterly useless for the average boy.

Milton's poems are greatly praised. Well, I am not going to say a word against the people who talk in public about the most wonderful epic in our language and who never read it; but how many people have read Milton's magnificent prose works? Milton first taught me the true notion of education, that the greatest mistake is in teaching subjects in watertight compartments. It is the idea underlying one of the most instructive books ever written, "Sandford and Merton." When teaching a subject, teach all sorts of other subjects as well. If Mr. Barlow's boys were interested in astronomy he showed them stars and planets through a telescope for a night or two, but he gave them no stupefying course on astronomy. He gave them stars and the solar system just as long as they were interested. He used a globe as well as mere maps in teaching them geography and history, but the soul-destroying idea of a course of study on "the use of the globes" did not commend itself to him. They walked over the fields and took an interest in trees and flowers, but he gave them no stupefying course on botany. When he gave them a lesson on English grammar or literature he taught them at the same time the geography and history and the fairy stories of their country. How can a man give a course on grammar or geography or history or anything else without diverting his talk in an interesting way