TRAINING THE MIND DOWN.

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spoken elsewhere on this subject, and here I will merely express my strong conviction that boys' minds are frequently dwarfed, and their interest in intellectual pursuits blighted, by the practice of employing the first years of their school life in learning by heart things which it is quite impossible for them to understand or care for. Teachers set out by assuming that little boys can not understand anything, and that all we can do with them is to keep them quiet and cram them with forms which will come in useful at a later age. When the boys have been taught on this system for two or three years, their teacher complains that they are stupid and inattentive, and that so long as they can say a thing by heart they never trouble themselves to understand it. In other words, the teacher grumbles at them for doing precisely what they have been taught to do, for repeating words without any thought of their meaning.

In this very important matter I am fully alive to the difference between theory and practice. It is so easy to recommend that boys should be got to understand and take an interest in their work-so difficult to carry out the recommendation! Grown people can hardly conceive that words which have in their minds been associated with familiar ideas from time immemorial, are mere sounds in the mouths of their pupils. The teacher thinks he is beginning at the beginning if he says that a transitive verb must govern an accusative, or that all the angles of a square are right angles. He gives his pupils credit for innate ideas up to this point, at all events, and advancing on this supposition he finds that he can get nothing out

of them but memory-work, so he insists on this that his time and theirs may not seem to be wholly wasted. The great difficulty of teaching well, however, is after all but a poor excuse for contentedly teaching badly, and it would be a great step in advance if teachers in general were as dissatisfied with themselves as they usually are with their pupils.*

I do not purpose following Mr. Spencer through his chapters on moral and physical education. In practice I find I can draw no line between moral and religious education; so the discussion of one without the other has not for me much interest. Mr. Spencer has some very valuable remarks on physical education which I could do little more than extract, and I have already made too many quotations from a work which will be in the hands of most of my readers.

Mr. Spencer differs very widely from the great

*Mr. Spencer and Professor Tyndall appeal to the results of experience as justifying a more rational method of teaching. Speaking of geometrical deductions, Mr. Spencer says: "It has repeatedly occurred that those who have been stupefied by the ordi nary school-drill-by its abstract formulas, its wearisome tasks, its cramming-have suddenly had their intellects roused by thus ceasing to make them passive recipients, and inducing them to become active discoverers. The discouragement caused by bad teaching having been diminished by a little sympathy, and sufficient perseverance excited to achieve a first success, there arises a revolution of feeling affecting the whole nature. They no longer find them. selves incompetent; they too can do something And gradually, as success follows success, the incubus of despair disappears, and they attack the difficulties of their other studies with a courage insuring conquest."

IMPORTANCE OF HIS BOOK.

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I have ventured in turn

body of our schoolmasters. to differ on some points from Mr. Spencer; but I am none the less conscious that he has written not only one of the most readable, but also one of the most important books on education in the English language.

X.

THOUGHTS AND SUGGESTIONS.

Our old

ONE of the great wants of middle-class education at present, is an ideal to work toward. public schools have such an ideal. The model public school-man is a gentleman who is an elegant Latin and Greek scholar. True, this may not be a very good ideal, and some of our ablest men, both literary and scientific, are profoundly dissatisfied with it. But, so long as it is maintained, all questions of reform are comparatively simple. In middle-class schools, on the other hand, there is no terminus ad quem. A number of boys are got together, and the question arises, not simply how to teach, but what to teach. Where the masters are not university men, they are, it may be, not men of broad views or high culture. Of course no one will suppose me ignorant of the fact that a great number of teachers who have never been at a university, are both enlightened and highly cultivated; and also that many teachers who have taken degrees, even in honors, are neither. But, speaking broadly of the two classes, I may fairly assume that the non-university men are inferior in these respects to the graduates. If not, our universities should be reformed on Carlyle's "live-coal" principle, without further loss of time. Many nonuniversity masters have been engaged in teaching (260)

BAD TEACHING.

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ever since they were boys themselves, and teaching is a very narrowing occupation. They are apt therefore to be careless of general principles, and to aim merely at storing their pupils' memory with facts --facts about language, about history, about geog raphy, without troubling themselves to consider what is and what is not worth knowing, or what faculties the boys have, and how they should be developed. The consequence is their boys get up, for the purpose of forgetting with all convenient speed, quantities of details about as instructive and entertaining as the Propria quæ maribus, such as the division of England under the Heptarchy, the battles in the wars of the Roses, and lists of geographical names. Where the masters are university men, they have rather a contempt for this kind of cramming, which makes them do it badly, if they attempt it at all: but they are driven to this teaching in many cases because they do not know what to substitute in its place. Their own education was in classics and mathematics. Their pupils are too young to have much capacity for mathematics, and they will leave school too soon to get any sound knowledge of classics, so the strength of the teaching ought clearly not to be thrown into these subjects. But the master really knows no other. He soon finds that he is not much his pupils' superior in acquintance with the theory of the English language or with history and geography. There are not many men with sufficient strength of will to study whilst their energies are taxed by teaching, and standard books are not always within reach: so the master is forced to content himself with hearing lessons in a perfunctory way out of dreary school-books. Hence