Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/83

Rh to have sixty or eighty pupils in a class all precisely at the same stage, all gifted with the same receptive capacity, the same mechanical skill, the same imitative ability. What can be done when there is only one Copy for the whole form? Necessarily all must write it whether they are able or not. For some the Copy will be much too easy, for others about right, for the residue much too difficult. As a rule teachers insist upon the value of individual instruction; here the principle is grossly violated, and hence the class becomes completely disorganised and the writing hour proves the most disagreeable and vexatious in the day. Such a grievance cannot exist where headline books are employed. Each pupil gets a book exactly suited to his own need, and when finished the next is equally adapted to his peculiar requirements, or, if dictated by expediency, the same book can be repeated. Ungraded models may fairly be considered as an insuperable obstacle to the reception of the Blank Book system, as propounded by its advocates.

.–In addition to the foregoing still another obstruction perplexes the enquirer, when the Temporary or Transient nature of Blackboard Models is considered. They are here one hour and gone the next, evanescent as a dream they are gone in the twinkling of an eye. They have no permanence; consequently all opportunity of reference and comparison has vanished with them.

Reasoning again by analogy, our maps, diagrams and illustrations preach to our children teaching, educating, and speaking their history every hour and every day to their juvenile beholders: they are not relegated to the shelves or oblivion of a locked-up store room, but they are on exhibition always and ever.

Similarly ought the Headlines and Perfect Copies to be perpetually speaking from the pages of the books and from the walls of the schoolroom to the pupils:–from the engraved copies in the former and from the enlarged Alphabet Diagrams on the latter.

It is by the daily and oft repeated sight of these Headlines that children derive their only mental perception and conception