Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/516

512 becomes interesting when in coordination with experiments in mechanics and physics; trigonometry becomes interesting in the actual measurements of heights and distances. The infinitesimal calculus is bound to be a weapon which any boy of fifteen easily gets to understand by actual use when he is dealing with dynamic experiments. In fact, the physical and mathematical laboratories are in one, and the same teacher takes charge of both subjects and teaches them as much as possible together.

Furthermore, in the preparation of an account of an investigation there are practical lessons in English composition; there is sketching, and also more careful drawing with instruments, and the finding of empirical laws, using squared paper. In such a school every subject is being taught through all the other subjects; every boy is doing the work in which he is greatly interested, and no boy is attending merely and putting in time. Furthermore, out of school-time there might be the usual restrictions as to "bounds," but otherwise I would let a boy do pretty much as he pleased. "Prep." at boarding schools and home lessons for boys at day schools are to be quite discredited. I would—it may cost a little more money—allow a boy to work in the workshops or laboratories or library or in his own room or common rooms at anything he pleases in this off-time, and I would give him advice only if he asks for it. If I saw a boy reading a penny dreadful I would not stop him; nor if he were reading Paine's "Age of Reason," or any wretched treatise on psychology or logic. I would in no way discourage a boy from acquiring a greater and greater fondness for reading, knowing that this is the foundation of future happiness and education, and that no harm which he can get from his reading is of the slightest importance in comparison with the importance of our main object. As he grows up he will become less and less fond of the six-penny magazine. The school can at its best be merely a preparation for the lifelong education of the man. I would not keep the boy at school after sixteen. Let him then go into business, or to a science or technical school, or to the university.

Unfortunately for the present no university will take men without an entrance examination involving other languages than English. This is a great evil, but it is not going to last much longer. In the meantime a competent coach will prepare any student to pass the necessary examinations (say, in Latin and Greek) in three months, even if there is much other work to do. This is not a matter of learning any classics; it is rather the manufacture of some contempt for the classics, a necessary evil for the present. Indeed, for the present, but let us hope not for long, there are many other necessary evils. We have to find competent enthusiastic teachers, we have to persuade governing bodies to pay salaries two or more times as great as at present, we have to make parents see that some mental training and fondness for reading and writing are really of value, and that Tom Sawyerism is only childish.