Part 2 (1/2)

The teacher, then, who kno thus to make a unit of twenty or thirty pupils, reallyto the whole class an increased ated mass I have seen a teacher instruct a class of forty in such a way, as, in the first place, to secure the subordinate end of ascertaining and registering with a sufficient degree of exactness how much each scholar knows of the lesson by his own preparation, and secondly, to secure, during the whole hour, the active exercise and cooperation of each individual mind, under the powerful stimulus of the social instinct, and of a keenly awakened attention Such a teacher accomplishes more in one hour than the slave of the individual method can accomplish in forty hours A scholar in such a class learns more in one hour than he would learn in forty hours, in a class of equal nu and tihest perfection, employed upon the noblest of ends

V

ON OBSERVING A PROPER ORDER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES

Educationin due order and proportion all the good and desirable parts of hureed Another truth, to which there is a general theoretical assent, is, that, in the order in which we develop the faculties, we should follow the leadings of nature, cultivating in childhood those faculties which see for maturer years the cultivation of those faculties which in the order of nature do not show e of eneral ripening of all the other powers The develop is in soe of growth suitable for the appearance and maturity of the leaf, another for the flower, a third for the fruit, and still a fourth for the perfected and ripened seed

The analogy has of course many limitations In the human plant, for instance, one class of faculties, after , does not disappear in order to make place for another class, as the flower disappears before there can be fruit Nor, again, is any class of faculties wanting altogether until the season for their developether--leaf, flower, fruit, and seed--at the sa

While these principles have received the general assent of educators, there has been a wide divergence a them as to some of the practical applications Which faculties do most naturally ripen early in life, and which late in life?

According to , as it is the ment Next in the order of maturity, and next also inpower Reason isto the latter materials for its action, as all the other powers, ination, and so forth, are ministers to reason, and supply it with its or and ment is little to be relied on, until we approach manhood Nature withholds from these faculties an earlier development, for the very reason, apparently, that they can ordinarily have but scanty materials for action until after the efflorescence of the other faculties The e, which the other faculties have gathered and stored, before reason and judg to the other end of the scale, I have as little doubt that the earliest of all the faculties to bud and blossom, is the Memory

Children not only commit to memory with ease, but they take actual pleasure in it Tasks, under which the grown-up ht heart, and execute without fatigue

Coery to the man, is the easiest of all tasks to the child More than this The things fixed in the s learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture, hyrammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, hich I became familiar when a boy But it is a labor of Hercules forthe age of ed an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse Now to reverse this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put shackles and restraints upon theall nore one of the primary facts of human nature It is to be wiser than God

Another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very -tiious belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to believe instinctively whatever is told him That we all do thus believe until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no demonstration Everybody's experience attests the fact It is equally plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature Ho and tedious would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as so to make him, a sceptic, that is, with aas true, except what it has first proved by experience and reason! On the contrary, howthese years of helplessness and dependency, by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood The same infinite wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the constitution of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of faith, which alone makes the father's and rowth and develop a child which required proof for every stateives? How cruel to force the confiding young heart into pre hi, when he has reasons, to him all-sufficient, in the fact that father,to dwell so long upon these elementary points Yet there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle here laid down Educators and systehest popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act upon the theory, that the first faculty of thepower Indeed, they are not far fro that the whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power, and they bend accordingly their h certain processes of reasoning, so called They require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to reason out a rule for hira to use it, or to commit it tocommitted to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical To commit blindly to ood have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish To receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for hirowing out of the age and the reputed wisdorowing out of a sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of reasoning Children reason, of course They should be encouraged and taught to reason No teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a child's intellectual powers But he will not consider this the season for its main, normal development He will hold this subject for the present subordinate to , which he does adopt, will be of a peculiar kind, suited to the nature of childhood, the results being ic To oblige a young child to go through a foristic statement in every step in elementary arith plain to a child's mind which was not plain before On the contrary, it often makes a muddle of what had been perfectly clear What was in the clear sunlight of intuition, is now in a haze, through the intervening ed to look at it

A primary teacher asks her class this question: ”If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how ht boy who should proht-year old Solon on the next bench has been better trained than that With stately and solemn enunciation he delivers himself of a performance somewhat of this sort ”If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies? Answer--I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies as I can buy with 1 penny If, therefore, I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies; and 5 times 6 marbles are 30 marbles Therefore, if I can buy 6 marbles with one penny, I can buy 30 ! And to train children, by forced and artificial processes, to go through such a rig their reasoning power and of i their power of expression! It is not pretended that children by such a process beco On the contrary, their movements as ready reckoners are retarded by it Instead of learning to ju-like, by a sort of intuitional process, which is of the very essence of an expert accountant, they learn laboriously to stay theircircumlocution of words And the expenditure of time and toil needed to acquire these formulas of expression, which nine tiistri_, is justified on the ground that the children, if not learning arith to reason

Let me not be misunderstood I do not advocate the disuse of explanations Let teachers explain, let children give explanations Let the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes, receive a certain aoing, in pri too much time to explanation and to theory, and too little to practice We reverse, too, the order of nature in this matter What it now takes weeks and , is apprehended at a later day with ease and delight at the very first state this whole matter It is simply this In the healthy and natural order of develop mind, theory should follow practice, not precede it Children learn the practice of arith They take to it naturally, and learn it easily, and become very rapidly expert practical accountants But the science of arithmetic is quite another matter, and should not be forced upon thee in their advancement

To have a really correct apprehension of the principle of decimal notation, for instance, to understand that it is purely arbitrary, and that we ht in the same way take any other nuht increase for instance by fives, or eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens--all this requires considerable

Indeed I doubt whetherchildren giving the rationale of everything, have themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in arithmetical notation Many of them would open their eyes were you to tell theers on your two hands ures 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15, as by the figures 10,--a truiseneralizations of higher arithmetic Yet it is up-hill work to inner We ive our children at first an arbitrary rule for notation We give them an equally arbitrary rule for addition They accept these rules and work upon them, and learn thereby the practical operations of arithmetic The theory will follow in due time When perfectly familiar with the practice and the forms of arithradually and surely, and alic which underlies the science

Hoe learn language in childhood? Is it not solely on authority and by exae is used but that which is logically and graraive any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others In other words, practice in language precedes theory It should do so in other things The parent who should take ue, except just so far and so fast as it could understand and explain the subtle logic which underlies all language, would be quite as wise as the teacher who refuses to let a child beco, until it can understand and explain at every step the rationale of the process,--ill not suffer a child to learn the multiplication table until it has mastered the metaphysics of the science of nuism exactly how and why seven times nine make sixty-three

These illustrations have carried me a little, perhaps, from my subject

But they see the air I have feared lest, in our very best schools, in the rebound from the exploded errors of the old system, we have unconsciously run into an error in the opposite extreme

My positions on the particular point now under considerationthe faculties, we should follow the order of nature

2 The faculties of ely exercised and cultivated in childhood