speak it."* Captain Basil Hall, who, as a naval man, felt the necessity of learning foreign living languages, declares, from his own experience, that, "to commence with grammar in learning a spoken language is perhaps the most complete instance of putting the cart before the horse that is anywhere to be met with." + The celebrated author of "Education Reform" also says, "To learn grammar and syntax in the end instead of the beginning, is following precisely the course of nature; it is learning the language analytically learning it, in fine, in the very way in which language itself has been formed. What was good in learning the mother tongue is good in learning the classical languages, is good in learning the languages to which they gave rise the language first, and then the grammar." ‡ To these authorities we will add that of a man who has always been remarkable for the acuteness of his discernment and the justness of his observations. Talleyrand says, in his Report on Public Instruction, "The rules of grammar, which are results demonstrated for him who is already acquainted with languages, and who has meditated on them, cannot, in any way, be the means of knowing them for him who is not acquainted with them. They are consequences; we cannot, without doing violence to reason, present them to him as principles." § GLEANINGS. [We commend the first of the following extracts from a paper by one of England's ablest and most independent thinkers on the subject of education, and one of her most successful teachers, Dr. Hodgson, to the attention of those of our readers who are inclined to sympathize with the views of that well-meant but wrong-headed pamphlet, The Daily Public School, which we criticised in a recent number.] LAYING FOUNDATIONS.-The Rev. Canon said, with reference to the present system, that it was vain to expect a good superstructure *Grammaire Générale. Fragments of Voyages and Travels. § Rapport sur l'Instruction Publique. without having a good foundation. That was a truism which no one could dispute; but when he proceeded to say that the foundation of education, as regards the working classes, is reading, writing and arithmetic, I beg leave most earnestly to express my dissent from that proposition. I do not believe that reading and writing, with arithmetic thrown into the bargain, can be said to form the foundation of any educational system whatever. Arithmetic may be said truly to be a science, and therefore it does not enter into the same category with reading and writing. Now I should as soon call a knife and fork the foundation of a dinner as I should have called reading and writing the foundation of education. And the illustration is more apt than at first sight appears. What is reading? It is at best a mechanical means of obtaining knowledge! And what is writing? It is a mechanical means of recording knowledge; but to confound reading and writing with knowledge itself, and still more with that mental gift and power which is far better than any knowledge whatsoever, is a lamentable and mischievous mistake. It is possible to have a well-instructed man or a well-instructed boy without any knowledge of reading or writing. The foundation of all education and the object of all education is the calling into play of the mental faculties, the intelligence and the moral nature; and the system which does it best through whatever instrumentality is the best system of instruction. But a system which regards a mere instrument as the foundation of all education is almost certain to lose sight of the fact that the great end we ought to aim at is the development and cultivation of the intelligence itself. It is perfectly possible to cultivate reading and writing in such a way as not only to fail to call out the intelligence but actually to stupefy it. I have an example in my eye in the case of a lower class school at Greenwich, of which it was some time ago complained that the boys were backward in reading; and it occurred to the managers that the best remedy for the evil was to engage an assistant master who was to take the backward boys and to employ them, hour by hour, in the mechanical practice of reading, in order that they might make up their leeway. This practice had gone on for some time, till a certain gentleman was appointed, who said: "This is a faulty system; you are not teach ing the boys, but stupefying them." Then he took them in hand and tried to explain the meaning of what they were reading, and he found that, even as regarded the mechanical process of reading itself, they made more progress than ever they had done or ever could have done under the system then pursued. I think it is extremely important that we should keep this end in view, and not exaggerate the importance of reading and writing unduly. Don't cram books into their hands too early; let them become acquainted with natural history; the constitution of their bodies; the relation between themselves and the objects which surround them, and it is little matter whether they know how to read and write at all. Far better give them useful knowledge, and so create a desire to read in order to obtain knowledge; but give them the power of reading only, and especially if it is obtained by a process which stupefies their intelligence, they will be indifferent to the acquiring of knowledge in time to come. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION.I trust that I may speak, at my age and in my position, without offence. But, while almost all are agreed that religion should be an essential part, the groundwork of education in a Christian country, I have long had doubts whether we are quite right in our common mode of teaching religion. I confess that I have often looked on a successful, I may say a brilliant, examination of a great school; I have been struck with the quickness and intelligence of the children; nothing, as far as it went, could surpass the readiness with which they have answered the most difficult questions, but still, I have said within myself, are these children who are so ready with the dubious dates and successions of the kings of Israel and Judah, so quick with their Scripture proofs, learned by rote with so much care, and repeated so glibly, (I cannot disguise from myself, in the ardor of competition, often flippantly,) in the right way towards real religion? Is this the best, the safe way of instilling those deep feelings of the solemnity of such subjects, without which, I doubt whether religion will grow into that silent, deep-seated control, that love and awe of God which are the only sources of true religion, which are, in fact, religion? Milton's grave admonition has been constantly in my mind. Our serious and lofty poet would not endure that the great classical orators and poets, with whose spirit he was so deeply imbued, should be desecrated, as he thought, and degraded from their majesty and vulgarized by being used as elementary school-books, by being prematurely forced on unripe minds. He would have Latin taught, not out of Tully and Virgil, but out of Cato and Columella. What would his solemn religious mind have thought if those books with whose spirit he was still more instinct, the Hebrew Prophets and Evangelists, the whole Bible, were used for the rough, coarse work of the earliest instruction, for reading, spelling, parsing lessons? Of all things, keep your Bible in the schools, but keep it in its proper place, in its inherent holy dignity. Do not make it a spelling-book and a grammar. Let boys be promoted to the honor and distinction of reading it; let that be a privilege. Let it never be read carelessly, blunderingly, dissonantly to the ear, disenchantingly to the mind. I cannot doubt but that the religious instincts are by no means dormant in the child, but they require to be sagaciously dealt with. I do not mean to refer to those religious prodigies which we sometimes hear of (all will allow exceptional cases), where the child learns to speak religious language, nothing but religious language; these I greatly suspect. But I cannot refuse to think that the pupil's heart is more likely to be really touched, that he will have more religious habit of thought and feeling, more redeeming reminiscences of religion in the after struggles of life, from a judicious, concise and impressive teaching out of the Bible, than from reading it unintelligently, and, as a matter of course, chapter after chapter; or crowding his untenacious memory with theological definitions, sometimes of the most abstruse metaphysical theology. Try to make him a Christian; you will hardly make him a divine. To repeat religious words by rote is not to become religious Dare I say that I think well-selected passages of the Scriptures, read by the master himself, by the pupil-teacher, by, it may be, the most advanced children, with propriety, with force, with right pronunciation and emphasis; above all, with quiet, unaffected reverence, will go farther to secure a lodgement for these passages in the memory, to mingle them up with the thoughts and feelings, than to hear them blundered through, without intonation, without any apparent consciousness of their meaning, by boy after boy; the whole class watching with eager emulation, not for the sense and solemn signification of the words, but to catch the reader in a mistake, and take his place? Teach religion, I say, by all means; but teach it religiously, not in the same light and easy manner in which you teach the commonest household things. Dean Milman. - Many a child would find the Lord's day a day of calm and happiness; would grow up in a belief that religion was a sweet and pleasant thing; that virtue was not a hardship; that vice was of itself detestable; and that God was far wiser than even his own father, and kinder than even his own mother, but for those ingeniously obstructive means that divines have invented for the purpose of checking the spontaneous spiritualities of children. A child is supposed to be religiously brought up, if his Sunday hours are choked with liturgies and collects and catechisms. He repeats definitions of doctrines that are beyond the comprehension of humanity. He is taught to regard as sinful, actions as extraneous to morality as the neighing of a horse. His duty to God is made obscure by the midnight of superfluous words. His duty to his neighbor, that intuition or example would imperceptibly have taught, is made odious by being communicated in a long and difficult formula, which he has to repeat like a parrot. — D'Arcy Thompson. THE MEMORY.-Whosoever would show himself a great artist in the profound, but as yet infant, art of teaching, should regard all arbitrary taxes upon the memory with the same superstition that a wise lawgiver should regard the punishment of death. The lawgiver who sets out with little knowledge (and, therefore, little veneration) of human nature is perpetually invoking the thunders of the law to compensate the internal weakness of his own laws; and the same spirit of levity disposes inefficient teachers to put in motion the weightiest machinery of the mind for the most trifling purposes. But we are convinced that this law should be engraven on the title page of all elementary books, that the memory is degraded if it be called in to deliver any individual fact, or any number of individual facts, or for any less purpose than that of delivering a comprehensive law, by means of which the under |
