Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/77

Rh order to fill them up with approximate imitations of the defective Blackboard models. They are never to see anything outside these blank books but the very imperfect writing–often indeed little better than caricatures of their respective teachers. They are never to see anything inside their books but their own faulty and distorted outlines. Nothing from cover to cover but indifferent, crude, and, in most instances, wretchedly bad writing. Looking over the pages of his book, as the pupil is sure to do again and again, he sees no standard of perfection to counteract the demoralising influence of a continual familiarity with that which is essentially inferior–and inevitably the writer's own Scrawl becomes his ideal which the occasional glimpse of his teacher's flourishing on the Blackboard, when setting the Copy, entirely fails to remove or destroy. And may we expect a child to rise above his ideal? A remarkable rejoinder is here met with. "The boys or girls will be forced to look at the Copy on the Blackboard when writing in blank books. in Headline Copy Books pupils simply copy the Headline once and then proceed to imitate their own handiwork, making mistakes, repeating them and growing worse and worse until they reach the last line in the page. When they use blank books they cannot perpetrate this abomination. In blank books the writing will improve line by line down the page, and we thus get rid once and for ever of that annoyance to teachers which results in such disastrous ."

Is not this the ne plus ultra of nonsense or obtuseness? How shall we, how we reply to these statements? Is there any conceivable cause why a lazy or stupid child, who will not take the trouble to look at and try to imitate a headline under his very eyes and only two or three inches from his pen, will exert himself still more energetically to refer to and try to imitate a copy ten to twenty feet distant from him? Is there not rather every reason to conclude, that a page of blank book writing will, as it proceeds downwards, deteriorate in a much greater degree than a page of Headline writing, where the writer can hardly avoid looking at the perfect model times and again whilst the lines are being written?