THE HALF-TIME SYSTEM OF SCHOOL INSTRUCTION.

[Some of our readers will recognize in the following article a portion of a paper read at the meeting of the State Teachers' Association recently held in Boston. It is an account of a very interesting educational experiment, made in another country, and under conditions in many respects quite different from those under which such questions present themselves to us. We offer it to our readers in the hope that it will elicit discussion upon the question how far the same evils exist in this country, and how far, and in what ways, the principles enunciated are capable of a practical application among us.]

If I were to say to you that I think that teachers as a body are overworked, that they are too much confined within-doors, that there is too great a strain upon their nervous system, too much of that wear and tear of mind which is of all things the most exhausting, I suppose I should find but few practical teachers here present to gainsay me. If I were then to express the opinion that a portion of this confinement, of this nervous exhaustion, this wear and tear from routine work is useless, and leads to very small results, I think I should find many here to agree with me. And if I should still further venture the assertion as to the cause of the uselessness of much of our labor, that, if it exhausts the adult teacher, it is still more exhausting and injurious to the immature pupil, at an age when his strongest craving is for change and activity, his most pressing want is physical, not mental development, I think I should again meet a general assent to my proposition from practical teachers, and it would be agreed that the youthful pupils' power to receive was very far below the teachers' power to impart intellectual instruction within given limits of time.

If, then, I were, as a logical consequence of these positions, to proceed to advocate, first, a material shortening of school hours, so far as regards intellectual labor; and secondly, and to make up for it, a material increase in the liveliness, directness, and vigor of our teaching; I should find, I think, many who would sympathize with such a view. If next I should propose to fill up the time so

gained with vigorous physical exercises, or, wherever practicable, with active industrial occupations; if, for instance, I should suggest that the future farmer or the future mechanic should begin even in childhood to alternate between school instruction and an apprenticeship to the craft to which he intended to devote himself,-so many hours per day to study and so many to actual work, or one day to study and the other to work, alternately, some might think that a good plan. If I were to say that the girls of the poorer classes, especially in our cities, by devoting themselves entirely in our schools to intellectual pursuits, some of them of not the most useful kind, very often get their heads filled with false notions, get discontented with their position without learning the only true and right way to better it, and that the path is thus opened to temptation to go terribly wrong through the very influence which of all others should keep them right, I should make a statement which I know could be sustained by evidence, and which would doubtless be corroborated by the experience of some here present. If, now, I were to propose for these girls an alternation between study and the learning of such common household duties as they will have to perform in after life, if such a scheme were possible, it would appear, I think, to many, to offer a promise of rendering them happier, safer, more contented with their lot, and would perhaps do something to solve this domestic help question, which is wearing the lives out of all our housekeepers, do something to enable the future wives of mechanics and laboring men to keep their husbands from the grog shop, and be withal an education which many of their sisters, more fortunate in a worldly point of view, might well find occasion to envy.

But it would immediately be objected by some adherent of good old ways, that all these propositions on my part are mere theory. Children, they will say, after all you can do, don't learn enough; and here comes a proposal to diminish the little they do learn. The teacher, to be sure, is worn out, but then we are all born to labor and trouble; and if they don't like the business, they can leave it. It's all of a piece, they will probably say, with that pestilent radicalism that's for abolishing the good old Puritan custom of three Sunday services; that pretends that one good sermon

is all it can digest, and, so it be really good, all a minister ought to write; and that Sunday was made for something beside long sermons; and even wants to have the City Library, as well as the oyster shops, open on that day. It is a part of the radicalism of the day, "and ought, sir," you have all seen the good old-fashioned conservative express his opinion," it ought, sir, to be entirely discountenanced." And forthwith he goes and asks the master to give his John longer lessons; "and give it to him well, sir, if he don't learn 'em: that's what I got when I was a boy"; silently implying that he is the undoubted standard of perfection.

Well; I have to acknowledge that, so far as I know in this country, the view I have been taking of school labor is still mere theory; but what if I could confront our respectable conservative with the results of a European experiment so thorough, so long continued, so carefully observed, that even he would have to yield, if indeed there is any such thing as yielding in a thorough-paced conservative. Of such an experiment, I here propose to give an

account.

It may be known to you that the question how to reconcile the claims of education and the claims of labor, in the case of the vast body of the children of English factory operatives, has long perplexed the minds of English philanthropists. So bitter is the struggle for very existence with large classes of these operatives - it is sad to have to record it of a civilized nation that it is often a question with the parents of the laboring population between using the labor of their children to help support the family, or the alternative of destitution and starvation without it Yet the state cannot suffer these children to grow up wholly ignorant and benighted heathen. The benevolent Raikes tried to meet the difficulty by the establishment of Sunday-schools, with some, but very insufficient good results. The old Factory Acts contained provisions for the education of the factory children, but it was easy to evade them where it was for the interest both of employer and employed to do so. At length that enlightened philanthropist, Mr. Edwin Chadwick, whose name has been so long and so honorably identified with the English Poor-Law Board, and with Sanitary Reformation, proposed that a compromise should be effected by

devoting strictly a certain small part of each day, say two hours, to learning, and the remainder to work; or that, if more convenient, as it would be in some occupations, two days, or alternate days, as the case might be, should be devoted to study, and the others to manual labor. It was of course naturally expected that this ar rangement would prove to be in the nature of a compromise; that something would have to be deducted from the results of labor on account of education, and something from the results of education on account of labor- that the children would not be so well taught as those who went to school all the week, nor their industrial training be so perfect as that of those who worked without intermission.

The experiment has been tried on a very large scale, through an extended period of time, and in a great variety of labors-in the great cotton-mills, like those of Mr. Akroyd, who employs operatives by the thousand; on the great farms of Mr. Paget, M. P., and Lord Hatherton, and in the pauper schools of the PoorLaw Unions; and with this extraordinary and most unexpected result, that the children who are at school only half the time, in intellectual attainments surpass the children who are at school all the time, while the children who are at work only half the time grow up into far more valuable and highly paid operatives than the children who are at work all the time. Thus on both sides the old Greek's paradox is illustrated that the half is sometimes more than the whole.

I say it is an extraordinary and paradoxical result; and at first sight it appears so. But when we examine it closely, we shall find nothing extraordinary about it except the blindness that can advocate any other system. For it is successful because it follows nature's teachings, while the other plan is too often a failure because it violates the plainest of nature's laws. In the Transactions of that learned body, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in the volume for 1860, there is a paper in the statistical department, by Mr. Chadwick, discussing the subject from a physiological and psychological point of view, and containing a very interesting letter from the most eminent of living comparative anatomists, Prof. Owen. As the volume is not

very accessible, I propose to give here the most important portions of Mr. Chadwick's paper.

Mr. Chadwick entitles his communication a paper "On the Physiological as well as Psychological Limits to Mental Labor," and begins as follows: "The business of education still requires for its successful prosecution scientific observation and the study of the subject to be operated on the human mind. Even to empirical observation it should have suggested itself that the mind has conditions of growth which are required to be carefully noted, to adapt the amount of instruction intended to be given to the power of receiving it. It is a psychological law that the capacity of attention grows with the body, and that at all the stages of bodily growth the capacity is increased by the skilful teacher's cultivation. Very young children can only receive lessons of one or two minutes' length. With increasing growth and cultivation their capacity of attention is increased to five minutes, then to ten; and at from five to seven years of age, to fifteen minutes. With growth and cultivation, by the tenth year a bright voluntary attention may be got to a lesson of twenty minutes, and at twelve years of age, to twenty-five minutes; and from thence to fifteen years of age, about half an hour; that is to say, of lessons requiring mental effort, as arithmetic, not carried beyond the point at which the mind is fatigued, with the average of children, and with good teaching. By very skilful teachers, and with very interesting lessons, the attention may be sustained for longer periods; but it is declared by observers, that prolonged attention beyond average limits is generally at the expense of succeeding lessons.

"The preponderant testimony which I have received in the course of some inquiries into educational subjects is, that with children, at about the average age of ten or eleven, or a little more, the capacity of bright, voluntary attention-which is the only profitable attention is exhausted by four varied lessons on subjects and exercises requiring mental effort of half an hour each, in the forenoon, even with intervals of relief. After the midday meal, the capacity of voluntary attention is generally reduced by one-half, and not more than two half-hour lessons, requiring voluntary effort, can be given with profit.