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little felt in Massachusetts, compared with what is effected in Boston, or Salem, or Worcester, or New Bedford. And if the teachers of Massachusetts really wish to advance the cause of school education in the country, let them maintain the high stand which they now hold, and continue to exert the influence which now emanates from their example, and they will accomplish a far higher good than by putting in motion a new political piece of machinery. AN OLD SCHOOLMASTER.

LEARNING BY ROTE.

[From an article in the English Journal of Psychological Medicine, (vol. xii.) on "The Artificial Production of Stupidity in Schools."]

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We are convinced that a very large proportion of the stupidity now existing in the world is the direct result of a variety of influences, educational and social, which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain, cither by checking its development altogether, or by unduly stimulating the sensorium at the expense of the intelligence. In the former case general obtuseness is the result; and in the latter, subjugation of the reasoning powers to the sensations and emotions. We are entitled to think these conditions strictly artificial, and to look upon them as distortions, analogous, in some respects, to the physical distortions of Hindoo fakirism. Upon testing the educational customs of the present day by even the most elementary principles of psychology, it becomes apparent that a very large number of children receive precisely the kind of training which has been bestowed upon a learned pig. There are scarcely any schoolmasters who have in the least degree studied the operations of the development of mind (indeed, it is only within a very few years that this study has borne any fruit of great practical utility); and those who have not done so cannot realize the existence of a kind of learning which is sensational alone. . . . . The first impressions made upon the consciousness of a child have a strong natural tendency to expand themselves through the sensorium, and usually do so unless

directed higher by the manner in which they are produced and maintained. For the purpose of such direction, time is an element of the first importance; and the idea which would be grasped by the intelligence after a certain period of undisturbed attention, will excite the sensational faculties alone if that attention be diverted by the premature intrusion of something else that solicits notice. . . . . In schools, however, under the stern pressure of the popular demand for knowledge, it is an extremely common practice to accumulate new impressions with greater rapidity than they can be received. The work laid down can often only be accomplished by means of the promptitude that is a chief characteristic of instinctive action. The child who uses his sensorium to master the sounds of his task uses an instrument perfected for him by the Great Artificer. The child who uses his intelligence must perfect the instrument for himself, must grope in the dark, must puzzle, must catch at stray gleams of light, before his mind can embrace the whole of any but the simplest question. The former brings out his result, such as it is, immediately; the latter by slow degrees, often first giving utterance to the steps by which he is reaching it. The former is commonly thought quick and clever; the latter slow and stupid; and the educational treatment of each is based upon this assumption widely as it often is at variance with the facts. The child whose tendency is to sensational activity should be held back, and be made to master the meaning of everything he is allowed to learn. He is usually encouraged to remember sounds, is pushed forward, is crammed with words to the exclusion of knowledge, is taught to consider himself a prodigy of youthful talent. The child who tries to understand his lessons should be encouraged, praised, supplied with food for thought of a kind suited to his capacity and aided by a helping hand over the chief difficulties in his path. He is usually snubbed as a dunce, punished for his slowness, forced into sensational learning, as his only escape from disgrace. The master, in many cases, has little option in the matter. Children are expected to know more than they have time to learn; parents and examiners must have show and surface, things only to be purchased at the expense of solidity and strength. A discreet

teacher may often feel sympathy with the difficulties of a pupil; but the half hour allotted to the class is passing away, the next subject is treading upon the heels of the present, and the child must complete his task like the rest; and so a budding intellect may be sacrificed to the demands of custom.

Among the children of the educated classes the circumstances of domestic life usually afford to the intelligence an amount of stimulus, which, if not of the best possible kind, is at least sufficient to compensate in some degree for the sensational work of the school. . . . . But, for the most part, the children of the poor have grown up like wild animals, excepting for the advantage of an occasional beating; and their nervous centres have received few impressions unconnected with the simplest wants of existence. Coincidentally with an entire absence of intellectual cultivation, they usually display a degree of sensational acuteness not often found in the nurseries of the wealthy, and arising from that habitual shifting for themselves in small matters which is forced upon them by the absence of the tender and refined affection that loves to anticipate the wants of infancy. They go to school for a brief period, and the master strives to cram them with as much knowledge as possible. They learn easily, but they learn only sounds, and seldom know that it is possible to learn anything more. In many cottages there are children who, as they phrase it, "repeat a piece" at the half-yearly examination. We say, from frequent experiments, that they will learn for this purpose a passage in any foreign language as easily as in English; or that they will learn an English paragraph backwards if told to do so; and that in neither case will any curiosity be excited about the meaning of the composition. . . . . . . They do not usually understand what "meaning" is. An urchin may be able to say correctly that a word pointed out to him is an adverb or a pronoun, may proceed to give a definition of either, and examples of instances of its occurrence, and may produce an impression that he understands all this, when the truth is that he has only learned to make certain noises in a particular order, and when he is unable to say anything intelligible about the matter in language of his Or he may repeat the multiplication table, and even work

own.

by it, saying that seven times eight are fifty-six, without knowing what fifty-six is, or what seven times eight means. He knows all about seven or eight, not from schooling, but from the lessons of life, from having had seven pence or eight marbles; but of the fiftysix, which is beyond his experience, he knows nothing. The nature of the mental operations of such children is, perhaps, as little known to the teacher, to the vicar of the parish, or the kind ladies who take an interest in the school, as the nature of the mental operations of the inhabitants of Saturn. . . . .

The best recorded illustration of such sensational learning is given by the Rev. Mr. Brookfield, H. M.'s Inspector, in his official report for 1855-6. Mr. Brookfield called upon two children, aged about eleven years, "who did their arithmetic and reading tolerably well, who wrote something pretty legible, intelligible and sensible, about an omnibus and about a steamboat," to write down the answers of the Church catechism to two questions. It must be observed that they had been accustomed to repeat the catechism during half an hour of each day in day-school and Sunday-school for four or five years; and the following is what they wrote:

"My duty toads God is to bleed in him to fering and to loaf withold your arts withold my mine withold my sold and with my sernth to whirchp and to give thinks to put my old trast in him. to call upon him to onner his old name and his world and to save him truly all the days of my life's end."

"My dooty tords my nabers to love him as thyself and to do to all men as I wed thou shalt do and to me to love onner and

sake my father and mother -to onner and to bay the queen and all that are pet in forty under her- to smit myself to all my gooness teaches sportial pastures and marsters-to oughten mysilf lordly and every to all my betters-to hut no body by would nor deed—to be trew in jist in all my deelins to beer no malis nor atid in your arts to kep my ands from pecken and steel my turn from evil speek and lawing and slanders-not to civet nor desar othermans good but to lern laber trewly to git my own leaving—and to do my dooty in that state of life and to each it his pleas God to call men."

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They did promis and voal three things in my name first that I should pernounce of the devel and all his walks pumps and valities of this wicked wold and all the sinful larsts of the flesh."

Mr. Brookfield remarks very justly that the error is not a mere matter of spelling, not a phonetic expression of ideas that are understood, but that it involves absolute non-apprehension of the meaning of the passages.....

We have already referred incidentally to a learned pig, and to the parallelism between its training and some kinds of human education. Persons familiar with the tricks taught to animals, are aware that these may all be described as muscular actions performed each consecutively to its proper signal. On hearing the finger nails of the master click together the animal does something in obedience to the sensation; nods its head, or shakes its head, or stands erect, as the case may be. It has no idea that the nod is an affirmation or the shake a negation, and probably has no thirst for knowledge about the matter, being content to play its part correctly and escape the whip. In the case of children the medium of communication is different and the kind of response is different, but the faculty in action is commonly the same. The words of the pig's master are mere by-play, intended to amuse the audience, and the signal is conveyed by other sounds. The words of the human teacher or examiner, his questions for instance, are the signals to the child, each requiring its appropriate answer; but, like the signals to the pig, they are aural sensations, capable as such of producing muscular action through the medium of the sensorium alone. The responses of the child are in words that is to say, in sounds that he has been taught, and that he remembers, but of which he need not understand one iota in order to repeat them, any more than the pig need understand the affirmative or negative character of its nod or shake. In the human species articulate speech is an act precisely analogous to locomotion, requiring the combined and harmonious working of several muscles and the guidance of sense, but in no way essentially connected with the intelligence; and the child may make the right

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