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things should be secured. The parallel desks to face the wall at the distance of 5 feet from it. On the wall should be hung the black-board and maps when required. To each section a particular part of the school-room should be allotted with sufficient space for drafts and classes, so that in the movements which occur, one section should not interfere with another. Each section should be furnished with all the apparatus it requires,—that it may not be necessary in any lesson to obtain an article from another part of the school. It will aid the orderly working of the section if its slates, books, ink, pens, chalk, duster, black-boards, pointers, &c. are committed to the charge of Monitors, whose duty it would be to see that they were all kept in their right places, and in proper condition. QUESTION 4.

Employment to be intelligent must be suitable, and calculated to arrest the attention.

Employment is suitable, when it is adapted to the state of mental development and attainment and it is calculated to arrest the attention when it is thus adapted to the children's state.

That employment may be constant, it must not only be intelligent, but there must be variety, a definite amount, supervision, revision and advancement.

Variety is essential because the power of continuous attention in children to one subject is weak, a definite amount of labour in each lesson and for a given period furnishes a motive to diligence, and provides a test for it. Supervision is required, because temptations to idleness and indolence amongst children are many. Revision is essential in order to secure the diligence both of children and subordinate teachers. Advancement from draft to draft and from section to section so as to reward the diligent, and spur the indolent. We propose then to secure intelligent and constant employment by the following means.

1. By a careful classification of the children according to intelligence and attainments in drafts, classes, and sections.

2. By a skilful graduation of the

subjects of instruction to suit the different states of the children.

3. By marking out for each class a definite amount of work to be accomplished in a given period.

4. By dviiding the school hours into equal portions, say, of half an hour's length and assigning to each a distinct lesson, involving change of place and subject at the end of it.

5. By placing an apprentice and two monitors over each section of four drafts. The apprentice to form two drafts alternately into a class, and to be held responsible for the diligence and progress of the whole section.

6. By appointing certain parts of each day for revising the lessons prepared under the apprentices, and for supplementing their instruction; and this in every section and with everychild.

7. By examinations of the drafts at the end of short fixed periods, for the advancement of the proficient, and of sections at longer periods, for removal into higher sections.

8. By registering at each examination the state and progress of each child in a book prepared for the purpose, and on a card for the inspection of the children's parents.

To accomplish these purposes, it will be absolutely necessary to draw out a routine of daily labour, and to form a well digested syllabus of instruction adapted to the wants of the school and to its local circumstances.

The routine must inform one of the work of every part of the school at every hour of the day, for every day in the week, and should show whether it is carried on by the apprentices or teacher; whether it is in the desks, at the drafts, or on the gallery.

The syllabus should be for a given period of moderate length, because the value of instruction is lost by extending it over too wide a surface. At the completion of the period too, the opportunity should be seized, to reconsider its different topics in the light of its experience, expunging where useless, strengthening where weak, and supplementing where deficient. G.

No. 19.

PAPERS FOR THE SCHOOLMASTER.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1852.

Childhood.

When we reflect what it is we commit to a Master or a Mistress, we may well wonder whether it is possible for any other profession to require more peculiar natural qualities of mind and disposition, and more special preparation than that of the Educator. For what is a child, which we are too prone to entrust to any empiric, or incapable bankrupt? We fancy that we see a wayward thing whose buoyousness must be curbed, and love of mischief overborne by bodily chastisements? How little do we think that, in every child there is the germ of a man, who will have to live in a thousand relations to his fellow-man, and after expending his allotted time here will have to wing his way to enter on new relations in another and an endless world. Can we educate aright while we are thoughtless of this truth? But, much more than this. Can we educate aright, if we know not and have not studied the science of childhood-its lurking capabilities-its dormant powers-its bright fires-its intense affections, and its world of poetry? What mean its ceaseless energies?—its elasticity of spirits?—its love of play? Are these but evidences of a restless and rebellious creature, crying for the compassion of the christian, and the correction due to an outcast? Or do they tell of powers, now pent up in childhood's prison, which need a gentle and a sympathising hand, not to crush them, but to guide and nurture them? Assuredly the chief desideratum of an Educator of children is not scholarship. The most successful need not be necessarily learned, much less must they wear the mien of a monk, or a sour ascetic. But this they must

be-skilled in the science of childhood. Cheerfulness is the character of a child, and wo! to that Educator who would tinge it with gloom. Workhouses have often been the breeding-places of human monsters, because no mother has been there to surround the new life of the babe with a laughing infancy; or mothers only in name, whose hearts profligacy or ruin have petrified, have rudely and for ever knocked off the dust of those early blossoms. Infancy is an early morning; then let it be bright and untarnished with a cloud, and it will give the better prospect of a bright and sunny day. The life of promise must begin with a smiling spring.

At first, the infant finds itself in a world so deluged with the things of sense that it scarcely hears, and scarcely sees. But soon its passiveness flits by. It unites itself to the outer world by its organs of sense. Its eyes behold the bright color with wonder; its hands attempt to grasp the things around it, and its ears are pleased with its mother's pleasant accents. Its education has begun, Its abode should be no dark dungeon, but a sunny room; its lungs should breathe a vital atmosphere, and it should be taught to measure distances as it looks on the prospect without, and to hold communion with objects within. We say communion, for a child is not a mere animal. As it grows, it has a life within it, beyond that of mere existence. It is the life of intelligence. Its buddings forth will shew themselves, not as with animals, by a communion with even the inanimate things which surround it. Alive itself, it will give life to everything else. The sun and moon and stars all live in its sight. The doll is a baby, the stick a sceptre, and the wooden horse is to its little owner what the dray-horseis to its master. The wondering child lives, and God intended that he should live, in a little world of poetry and fancy. Nor is this the poetry so much of ignorance, as of joyousness and cheerfulness, which throws an ideal condition around the real objects of its senses. Do violence to these impulses of a child, spurn its amusements, curb its fruitful imagination which transforms inanimate things into animate, and bowers into elysiums, by words and looks of harshness, and you hurt irrecoverably the bloom of manhood's promise. The very nursery, especially of workhouses and unions, is a subject most suited to the political economist and statesman. To err in childhood is to err to a Nation's shame, and irretrievably.

But childhood passes into boyhood. Let the child have passed, as he should have passed, into boyhood with his natural joyousness unabated, and the pent-up activity, which erewhile expressed itself in merry laughs and happily good-natured tumbles, will work itself still outward from within in roystering games. Remove, as you value the future man, this child from those whom the trouble of life has made morose, and to whom the overflowings of animal energy have no charm, and who "hate children;" and let no rough grown-up hand of an impetuous teacher, mistaking it for crime, crush the superabundant energy. It was well devised that schools should be opened for those young infants whose parents some Divine visitation, or poverty, or sin, had disqualified for the office, where a playground with its pretty flowers and changing games should be more than half the school; but why, when the first few years have passed away, should school-life become a dull and wearisome routine? Education must embrace the boy in his play-time as well as his study. It is the Educator's task not to repress the inward energies, but to watch and direct their unfoldings. Punishment for mis-doing should consist in a sense of disgrace rather than of pain; the boy who suffers pain without flinching, by reason of that overflowing energy, of which we have spoken, is a worshipped hero; and if he does flinch by reason of the might of that grown-up hand having crushed this energy, he is a hopeless slave; which character will prove the greatest blessing to himself and to society is a problem hard to be solved, and not worth the solution. If in the above remarks any additional argument should awaken itself in the mind of the thoughtful in regard to the mission of that sacred and responsible man or woman to society—the trainer of children; it will justify an increased effort to watch over the choice of these instruments, to whom we shall confide a Nation's hope, and the life-seed of posterity. Strange that a people's wisdom is more liable to be employed upon the science of rearing cattle, than of men for another generation, and of constructing a cradle rather than its tenant.

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Eres di a Lecture on the Ase of the Gallery, when plied to the Purposes of Instruction.

anting the different methods employed in this part of Seoul vri i v be sufficient to say that the one which seems to me vid de most general approval is that of taking the lesson by POR KITÖT with the natural divisions of the subject, to give Že Desam f the first part, proposing as many questions as shall ensure the wata sad not mere words are being communicated; and

the end of the first section of the subject, to propose a series of BERLINE TDESCs, pat individually, as a test that the ideas have INAT PUIHOLST PRceived, and can be reproduced in suitable language. TIM ICHT STisves of the subject are proceeded with in the same vy, md in the end of the sectional examinations the entire subject is mated simultaneously, with the design of arranging in a mari ri. End binding together the main points of the lesson;. sw be in fact a synthetical reconstruction of the whole.

The saccess of your gallery teaching will depend on attention to the following remarks on the several particulars involved in this

of your work; and no effort should be spared by you to work them out efficiently, as your standing as a Teacher will be determined in a great measure by the skill you display in this department.

In the first place, seek a clear conception of the purpose contemplated in this kind of teaching. In teaching the ordinary branches of school instruction, it is highly important that they should be so taught as to develope and train the various mental powers: but in collective instruction in the gallery, mental training becomes a 'special object, educing rather than conveying instruction, so far at least as the results of the children's observation and powers of judgment and reasoning will admit. The memory is still to be cultivated, but cultivated through the understanding.

You will apply the ordinary methods of communication to gallery teaching, subject only to those modifications which special circumstances may require. "All your instruction should be built on the compass of the child's existing knowledge, seeking to extend the boundaries of that knowledge by building up its conceptions of that which it does not know by its relations with what it does know; and in all matters of reasoning, leading from the known to the unknewz." In werking out these principles, you will require not one data 173at af methods; your own preparatory analysis, a synthetical *VENTOR SMÅ a rigorous use of interrogation.

la voir expostion, be characterized by adaptation to the capacity a the childrer under instraction. Any words or phrases used

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