1868.

PHILADELPHIA:
ELDREDGE & BROTHER,
17 and 19 South Sixth Street.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by ELDREDGE & BROTHER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

J. FAGAN & SON
STEREOTYPE FOUNDERS,
PHILADELPHIA.

PRINTED BY SHERMAN & CO.

TO THE
Teachers of the United States,
AND ESPECIALLY TO THE ALUMNI OF THE PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL, AND OF THE
New Jersey State Normal School
THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS ARE MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

The views contained in this volume are the result of a prolonged and somewhat varied professional experience. This experience includes the training of more than five thousand young men and of nearly one thousand young women, a large portion of them for the office of teachers; and it has been gained in College, in Boarding School, in a city High School, and in a State Normal School. In all this prolonged and varied experience, I have constantly put myself in the attitude of a learner, and my aim in the present volume is to place before the younger members of the profession, in the briefest and clearest terms possible, the lessons I have myself learned. Beginning with the question, What is Teaching? and ending with the wider question, What is Education? the book will be found to take a pretty free range over the whole field of practical inquiry among professional teachers. The thoughts presented are such as have been suggested to the writer in the school-room itself, while actively engaged either in teaching, or in superintending and directing the instruction given by others. These thoughts are for the most part purposely given in short, detached chapters, each complete in itself. Such a method of presentation, though less imposing, seemed to have practical advantages for the reader too great to be neglected for the mere vanity of authorship. Often one can find leisure to read a chapter of five or six pages on some point complete in itself, when he might not feel like reaching it through an intervening network of connected and dependent propositions. At the same time, it should be observed, the topics though detached are not isolated. There is everywhere an underlying thread of connection, the whole being based upon, if not constituting, a philosophy of education.

CONTENTS.

[What is Teaching?]

[The Art of Questioning]

[The Difference between Teaching and Training]

[Modes of Hearing Recitations]

[On Observing a Proper Order in the Development of the Mental Faculties]

[Teaching Children what they do not Understand]

[Cultivating the Memory in Youth]

[Knowledge before Memory]

[Power of Words]

[The Study of Language]

[Cultivating the Voice]

[Eyes]

[Errors of the Cave]

[Men of One Idea]

[A Talent for Teaching]

[Teaching Power]

[Growing]

[Loving the Children]

[Gaining the Affections of the Scholars]

[The Obedience of Children]

[Rarey as an Educator]

[A Boarding-School Experience]

[Phrenology]

[Normal Schools]

[Practice-Teaching]

[Attention as a Mental Faculty, and as a Means of Mental Culture]

[Gaining the Attention]

[Counsels:]

[To a Young Teacher];

[To a New Pupil];

[To a Young Lady on leaving School];

[To a Pupil on Entering a Normal School]

[An Argument for Common Schools]

[What is Education?]

[Model Text Books For Schools, Academies and Colleges.]

[What is Teaching?]
[The Art of Questioning]
[The Difference between Teaching and Training]
[Modes of Hearing Recitations]
[On Observing a Proper Order in the Development of the Mental Faculties]
[Teaching Children what they do not Understand]
[Cultivating the Memory in Youth]
[Knowledge before Memory]
[Power of Words]
[The Study of Language]
[Cultivating the Voice]
[Eyes]
[Errors of the Cave]
[Men of One Idea]
[A Talent for Teaching]
[Teaching Power]
[Growing]
[Loving the Children]
[Gaining the Affections of the Scholars]
[The Obedience of Children]
[Rarey as an Educator]
[A Boarding-School Experience]
[Phrenology]
[Normal Schools]
[Practice-Teaching]
[Attention as a Mental Faculty, and as a Means of Mental Culture]
[Gaining the Attention]
[Counsels:]
1. [To a Young Teacher];
2. [To a New Pupil];
3. [To a Young Lady on leaving School];
4. [To a Pupil on Entering a Normal School]
[An Argument for Common Schools]
[What is Education?]

[Model Text Books For Schools, Academies and Colleges.]

IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM.

I.
WHAT IS TEACHING?

In the first place, teaching is not simply telling. A class may be told a thing twenty times over, and yet not know it. Talking to a class is not necessarily teaching. I have known many teachers who were brimful of information, and were good talkers, and who discoursed to their classes with ready utterance a large part of the time allotted to instruction; yet an examination of their classes showed little advancement in knowledge.

There are several time-honored metaphors on this subject, which need to be received with some grains of allowance, if we would get at an exact idea of what teaching is. Chiselling the rude marble into the finished statue; giving the impression of the seal upon the soft wax; pouring water into an empty vessel;—all these comparisons lack one essential element of likeness. The mind is, indeed, in one sense, empty, and needs to be filled. It is yielding, and needs to be impressed. It is rude, and needs polishing. But it is not, like the marble, the wax, or the vessel, a passive recipient of external influences. It is itself a living power. It is acted upon only by stirring up its own activities. The operative upon mind, unlike the operative upon matter, must have the active, voluntary co-operation of that upon which he works. The teacher is doing his work, only so far as he gets work from the scholar. The very essence and root of the work are in the scholar, not in the teacher. No one, in fact, in an important sense, is taught at all, except so far as he is self-taught. The teacher may be useful, as an auxiliary, in causing this action on the part of the scholar. But the one, indispensable, vital thing in all learning, is in the scholar himself. The old Romans, in their word education (educere, to draw out), seem to have come nearer to the true idea than any other people have done. The teacher is to draw out the resources of the pupil. Yet even this word comes short of the exact truth. The teacher must put in, as well as draw out. No process of mere pumping will draw out from a child's mind knowledge which is not there. All the power of the Socratic method, could it be applied by Socrates himself, would be unavailing to draw from a child's mind, by mere questioning, a knowledge, for instance, of chemical affinity, of the solar system, of the temperature of the Gulf Stream, of the doctrine of the resurrection.

What, then, is teaching?

Teaching is causing any one to know. Now no one can be made to know a thing but by the act of his own powers. His own senses, his own memory, his own powers of reason, perception, and judgment, must be exercised. The function of the teacher is to bring about this exercise of the pupil's faculties. The means to do this are infinite in variety. They should be varied according to the wants and the character of the individual to be taught. One needs to be told a thing; he learns most readily by the ear. Another needs to use his eyes; he must see a thing, either in the book, or in nature. But neither eye nor ear, nor any other sense or faculty, will avail to the acquisition of knowledge, unless the power of attention is cultivated. Attention, then, is the first act or power of the mind that must be roused. It is the very foundation of all progress in knowledge, and the means of awakening it constitute the first step in the educational art.

When by any means, positive knowledge, facts, are once in possession of the mind, something must next be done to prevent their slipping away. You may tell a class the history of a certain event; or you may give them a description of a certain place or person; or you may let them read it; and you may secure such a degree of attention, that, at the time of the reading or the description, they shall have a fair, intelligible comprehension of what has been described or read. The facts are for the time actually in the possession of the mind. Now, if the mind was, according to the old notion, merely a vessel to be filled, the process would be complete. But mind is not an empty vessel. It is a living essence, with powers and processes of its own. And experience shows us, that in the case of a class of undisciplined pupils, facts, even when fairly placed in the possession of the mind, often remain there about as long as the shadow of a passing cloud remains upon the landscape, and make about as much impression.

The teacher must seek, then, not only to get knowledge into the mind, but to fix it there. In other words, the power of the memory must be strengthened. Teaching, then, most truly, and in every stage of it, is a strictly co-operative process. You cannot cause any one to know, by merely pouring out stores of knowledge in his hearing, any more than you can make his body grow by spreading the contents of your market-basket at his feet. You must rouse his power of attention, that he may lay hold of, and receive, and make his own, the knowledge you offer him. You must awaken and strengthen the power of memory within him, that he may retain what he receives, and thus grow in knowledge, as the body by a like process grows in strength and muscle. In other words, learning, so far as the mind of the learner is concerned, is a growth; and teaching, so far as the teacher is concerned, is doing whatever is necessary to cause that growth.

Let us proceed a step farther in this matter.

One of the ancients observes that a lamp loses none of its own light by allowing another lamp to be lit from it. He uses the illustration to enforce the duty of liberality in imparting our knowledge to others. Knowledge, he says, unlike other treasures, is not diminished by giving.

The illustration fails to express the whole truth. This imparting of knowledge to others, not only does not impoverish the donor, but it actually increases his riches. Docendo discimus. By teaching we learn. A man grows in knowledge by the very act of communicating it. The reason for this is obvious. In order to communicate to the mind of another a thought which is in our own mind, we must give to the thought definite shape and form. We must handle it, and pack it up for safe conveyance. Thus the mere act of giving a thought expression in words, fixes it more deeply in our own minds. Not only so; we can, in fact, very rarely be said to be in full possession of a thought ourselves, until by the tongue or the pen we have communicated it to somebody else. The expression of it, in some form, seems necessary to give it, even in our own minds, a definite shape and a lasting impression. A man who devotes himself to solitary reading and study, but never tries in any way to communicate his acquisitions to the world, or to enforce his opinions upon others, rarely becomes a learned man. A great many confused, dreamy ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has little exact and reliable knowledge. The truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. Had he been compelled to use his mental acquisitions in earning his bread, or had the love of Christ constrained him to use them in the instruction of the poor and the ignorant, he might have become not only a useful, but a learned man.

We see a beautiful illustration of this doctrine in the case of Sabbath-school teachers, and one reason why persons so engaged usually love their work, is the benefit which they find in it for themselves. I speak here, not of the spiritual, but of the intellectual benefit. By the process of teaching others, they are all the while learning. This advantage in their case is all the greater, because it advances them in a kind of knowledge in which, more than in any other kind of knowledge, men are wont to become passive and stationary. In ordinary worldly knowledge, our necessities make us active. The intercourse of business, and of pleasure even, makes men keen. On these subjects we are all the while bandying thoughts to and fro; we are accustomed to give as well as take; and so we keep our intellectual armor bright, and our thoughts well defined. But in regard to growth in religious knowledge, we have a tendency to be mere passive recipients, like the young man just referred to. Sabbath after Sabbath we hear good, instructive, orthodox discourses, but there is no active putting forth of our own powers in giving out what we thus take in, and so we never make it effectually our own. The absorbing process goes on, and yet we make no growth. The quiescent audience is a sort of exhausted receiver, into which the stream from the pulpit is perennially playing, but never making it full. Let a man go back and ask himself, What actual scriptural knowledge have I gained by the sermons of the last six months? What in fact do I retain in my mind, at this moment, of the sermons I heard only a month ago? So far as the hearing of sermons is concerned, the Sabbath-school teacher may perhaps be no better off than other hearers. But in regard to general growth in religious knowledge, he advances more rapidly than his fellow-worshippers, because the exigencies of his class compel him to a state of mind the very opposite of this passive recipiency. He is obliged to be all the while, not only learning, but putting his acquisitions into definite shape for use, and the very act of using these acquisitions in teaching a class, fixes them in his own mind, and makes them more surely his own.

I have used this instance of the Sabbath-school teacher because it enforces an important hint already given, as to the mode of teaching. Some teachers, especially in Sabbath-schools, seem to be ambitious to do a great deal of talking. The measure of their success, in their own eyes, is their ability to keep up a continued stream of talk for the greater part of the hour. This is of course better than the embarrassing silence sometimes seen, where neither teacher nor scholar has anything to say. But at the best, it is only the pouring into the exhausted receiver enacted over again. We can never be reminded too often, that there is no teaching except so far as there is active coöperation on the part of the learner. The mind receiving must reproduce and give back what it gets. This is the indispensable condition of making any knowledge really our own. The very best teaching I have ever seen, has been where the teacher said comparatively little. The teacher was of course brimful of the subject. He could give the needed information at exactly the right point, and in the right quantity. But for every word given by the teacher, there were many words of answering reproduction on the part of the scholars. Youthful minds under such tutelage grow apace.

It is indeed a high and difficult achievement in the educational art, to get young persons thus to bring forth their thoughts freely for examination and correction. A pleasant countenance and a gentle manner, inviting and inspiring confidence, have something to do with the matter. But, whatever the means for accomplishing this end, the end itself is indispensable. The scholar's tongue must be unloosed, as well as the teacher's. The scholar's thoughts must be broached, as well as the teacher's. Indeed, the statement needs very little qualification or abatement, that a scholar has learned nothing from us except what he has expressed to us again in words. The teacher who is accustomed to harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words, no matter how full of weighty meaning his words may be, is yet deceiving himself, if he thinks that his scholars are materially benefited by his intellectual activity, unless it is so guided as to awaken and exercise theirs. If, after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the subjects, on which he has himself been so productive, he will find that he has been only pouring water into a sieve. Teaching can never be this one-sided process. Of all the things we attempt, it is the one most essentially and necessarily a coöperative process. There must be the joint action of the teacher's mind and the scholar's mind. A teacher teaches at all, only so far as he causes this coactive energy of the pupil's mind.

II.
THE ART OF QUESTIONING.

The measure of a teacher's success is not what he himself does, but what he gets his scholars to do. In nothing is this more noticeable, than in the different modes of putting a question to a scholar. One teacher will put a question in such a manner as to find out exactly how much or how little of the subject the child knows, and thereby encourage careful preparation; to give the pupil an open door, if he really knows the subject, to express his knowledge in a way that will be a satisfaction and pleasure to him; to improve his power of expression, to cultivate his memory, to increase his knowledge, and to make it more thorough and definite. Another teacher will put his questions so as to secure none of these ends, but on the contrary so as to induce a most lamentable degree of carelessness and inaccuracy.

Let me illustrate this point, taking an example for greater convenience from a scriptural subject. Suppose it to be a lesson upon Christ's temptation, as recorded in the 4th chapter of Matthew. The dialogue between teacher and scholar may be supposed to proceed somewhat in this wise:

Teacher. Who was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil?

Pupil. Jesus.

T. Yes. Now, when Jesus had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward a—— what? How did he feel after that?

P. Hungry.

T. Yes, that is right. He was afterward "a hungered." Now, then, the next scholar. Who then came to Jesus and said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread?

(Scholar hesitates.)

T. The t——?

P. The tempter.

T. Yes, you are right. It was the tempter. Who do you think is meant by the tempter?—the devil?

P. Yes.

T. When a man has fasted, that is, has eaten nothing, for forty days and forty nights, and feels very hungry, would the suggestion of an easy mode of getting food be likely to be a strong temptation to him, or would it not?

P. It would.

T. Yes, you are right again. It would be a strong temptation to him.

I need not pursue this dialogue further. The reader will see at once how there may thus be the appearance of quite a brisk and fluent recitation, to which however the pupil contributes absolutely nothing. It requires nothing of him in the way of preparation, and only the most indolent and profitless use of his faculties while reciting. He could hardly answer amiss, unless he were an idiot, and yet he has the appearance, and he is often flattered into the belief, of having given some evidence of knowledge and proficiency.

The opposite extreme from the method just exhibited, is that known as the topical method. It is the method pursued in the higher classes of schools, and among more advanced students. In the topical method, the teacher propounds a topic or subject, sometimes in the form of a question, but more commonly only by a title, a mere word or two, and then calls upon the pupil to give, in his own words, a full and connected narration or explanation of the subject, such as the teacher himself would give, if called upon to narrate or explain it. The subject already suggested, if profound topically, would be somewhat in this wise:

The first temptation of Jesus.

Or, more fully: Narrate the circumstances of the first temptation of Jesus, and show wherein his virtue was particularly tried in that transaction.

The teacher, having propounded the subject clearly to the class, then waits patiently, maintaining silence himself, and requiring the members of the class to be silent and attentive, until the pupil interrogated is quite through, not hurrying him, not interrupting him, even with miscalled helps and hints, but leaving him to the free and independent action of his own faculties, in giving as full, connected, and complete an account of the matter as he can. When the pupil is quite through, the teacher then, but not before, makes any corrections or additional statements that may seem to be needed. In such an exercise as this, the pupil finds the absolute necessity of full and ample preparation; he has a powerful and healthy stimulus thus to prepare, in the intellectual satisfaction which one always feels in the successful discharge of any difficult task; and he acquires a habit of giving complete and accurate expression to his knowledge, by means of entire sentences, and without the help of "catch-words," or leading-strings of any kind.

Some classes, of course, are not sufficiently advanced to carry out fully the method here explained. But there are many intermediate methods, founded on the same principle, and suited to children in every stage of advancement. Only let it be understood, whatever the stage, that the object of the recitation is, not to show what the teacher can say or do, but to secure the right thing being said and done by the pupil.

To recur once more to the same subject, the temptation of Christ. For a very juvenile class, the questioning might proceed on this wise:

T. Where was Jesus led after his baptism?

P. He was led into the wilderness.

T. By whom was he led there?

P. He was led by the Spirit.

T. For what purpose was he led into the wilderness?

P. He was led into the wilderness to be tempted.

T. By whom was he to be tempted?

P. He was to be tempted by the devil.

T. What bodily want was made the means of his first temptation?

If the class is quite young, and this question seems too difficult, the teacher, instead of asking it, or after asking it and not getting a satisfactory answer, might say to his class, that Jesus was first tempted through the sense of hunger. He was very hungry, and the devil suggested to him an improper means of relieving himself from the inconvenience. He might then go on with some such questions as these:

T. What circumstance is mentioned as showing how very hungry he must have been?

P. He had fasted forty days and forty nights.

T. Mention any way in which you might be tempted to sin, if you were suffering from hunger?

The foregoing questions, it will be perceived, are very simple, being suited to scholars just advanced beyond the infant class. Yet no one of the questions, in its form, or terms, necessarily suggests the answer. No one of them can be answered by a mere "yes" or "no." No scholar, unacquainted with the subject, and with his book closed, can guess at the answer from the way in which the question is put. Not a question has been given, simple as they all are, which does not require some preparation, and which does not, to some extent, give exercise to the pupil's memory, his judgment, and his capacity for expression.

If the class is more advanced, the questions may be varied, so as to task and exercise these faculties more seriously. For instance, the teacher of a class somewhat older might be imagined to begin the exercise thus:

T. After the baptism of Jesus, which closes the 3d chapter of Matthew, we have an account of several temptations to which he was exposed. Now, open your books at the 4th chapter, and see if you can find out how many verses are occupied with the narrative of these temptations, and at what verse each temptation begins.

The teacher then requires all the class to search in silence, and each one to get ready to answer, but lets no answer be given until all are prepared. When all have signified their readiness, some one is designated to give the answer.

The books being closed, the questioning begins:

T. Name the different places into which Jesus was taken to be tempted, and the verse in which each place is named.

P. It is said in the 1st verse that Jesus was led up into the wilderness; in the 5th verse, that he was taken up into the holy city, and set on a pinnacle of the temple; and in the 8th verse, that he was taken up into an exceedingly high mountain.

T. What was the condition of Jesus, when the devil proposed his first temptation?

P. He had been fasting forty days and forty nights, and he was very hungry.

I need not multiply these illustrations. I have not made them entirely in vain, if I have succeeded in producing in the mind of the reader the conviction of these two things: first, that it is a most important and difficult part of the teacher's art, to know how to ask a question; and secondly, that the true measure of the teacher's ability is, not so much what he himself is able to say to the scholars, as the fulness, the accuracy, and the completeness of the answers which he gets from them.

III.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TEACHING AND TRAINING.

These two processes practically run into each other a good deal, but they ought not to be confounded. Training implies more or less of practical application of what one has been taught. One may be taught, for instance, the exact forms of the letters used in writing, so as to know at once by the eye whether the letters are formed correctly or not. But only training and practice will make him a penman. Training refers more to the formation of habits. A child may by reasoning be taught the importance of punctuality in coming to school; but he is trained to the habit of punctuality only by actually coming to school in good time, day after day.

The human machine on which the teacher acts, is in its essential nature different from the material agencies operated on by other engineers. It is, as I have once and again said, a living power, with laws and processes of its own. Constant care, therefore, must be exercised, in the business of education, not to be misled by analogies drawn from the material world. The steam-engine may go over its appointed task, day after day, the whole year round, and yet, at the end of the year, it will have no more tendency to go than before its first trip. Not so the boy. Going begets going. By doing a thing often, he acquires a facility, an inclination, a tendency, a habit of doing it. If a teacher or a parent succeeds in getting a child to do a thing once, it will be easier to get him to do it a second time, and still easier a third time.

A teacher who is wise, when he seeks to bring about any given change in a child, whether it be intellectual or moral, will not ordinarily attempt to produce the change all at once, and by main force. He will not rely upon extravagant promises on the one side, nor upon scolding, threats, and violence on the other. Solomon hits the idea exactly, when he speaks of "leading in the way of righteousness." We must take the young by the hand and lead them. When we have led them over the ground once, let us do it a second time, and then a third time, and so keep on, until we shall have established with them a routine, which they will continue to follow of their own accord, when the guiding hand which first led them is withdrawn. This is training.

The theory of it is true, not only in regard to things to be done, which is generally admitted, but also in regard to things to be known, which is often ignored if not denied. A boy, we will say, has a repugnance to the study of arithmetic. Perhaps he is particularly dull of comprehension on that subject. We shall not remove that repugnance by railing at him. We shall never make him admire it by expatiating on its beauties. It will not become clear to his comprehension by our pouring upon it all at once a sudden and overpowering blaze of light in the way of explanation. Such a process rather confounds him. Here again let us fall back upon the method of the great Teacher, "Line upon line, precept upon precept." We will first patiently conduct our boy through one of the simplest operations of arithmetic, say, a sum in addition. The next day we will conduct him again through the same process, or through another of the same sort. The steps will gradually become familiar to his mind, then easy, then clear. He learns first the practice of arithmetic, then the rules, then the relations of numbers, then the theory on which the rules and the practice are based, and finally, he hardly knows how, he becomes an arithmetician. He has been trained into a knowledge of the subject.

You wish to teach a young child how to find a word in a dictionary. You give at first, perhaps, a verbal description of the mystery of a dictionary. You will tell him that, in such a book, all the words are arranged according to the letters with which they begin; that all the words beginning with the letter A are in the first part of the book; then those beginning with the letter B, then those beginning with C, and so on; you tell him that all the words beginning with one letter, covering some one or two hundred pages, are again re-arranged among themselves according to the second letter of each word, and then again still further re-arranged according to the third letter in each, and so on to the end. Arouse his utmost attention, and explain the process with the greatest clearness that words can give, and then set him to find a word. See how awkward will be his first attempt, how confused his ideas, how little he has really understood what you have told him. You must repeat your directions patiently, over and over, "line upon line;" you must take him by the hand day after day, and train him into a knowledge of even so apparently simple a thing as finding a word in a dictionary.

While teaching and training are thus distinguishable in theory, in practice they are well nigh inseparable. At least, they never should be separated. Teaching has never done its perfect work, until, by training, the mind has learned to run in accustomed channels, until it sees what is true, and feels what is right, with the clearness, force, and promptitude, which come only from long-continued habit.

IV.
MODES OF HEARING RECITATIONS.

The first that I shall name is called the Concert Method. This is practised chiefly in schools for very young children, especially for those who cannot read. There are many advantages in this method, some of which are not confined to infant classes. The timid, who are frightened by the sound of their own voices when attempting to recite alone, are thereby encouraged to speak out; and those who have had any experience with such children, know that this is no small, or easy, or unimportant achievement. Another benefit of the method is the pleasure it gives the children. The measured noise and motion connected with such concert exercises, are particularly attractive to young children. Moreover, one good teacher, by the use of this method, may greatly multiply his efficiency. He may teach simultaneously fifty or sixty, instead of teaching only five or six. But in estimating this advantage, one error is to be guarded against. Visitors often hear a large class of fifty or more go through an exercise of this kind, in which the scholars have been drilled to recite in concert; and if such persons have never been accustomed to investigate the fact, they often suppose that the answers given are the intelligent responses of all the members of the class. The truth is, however, in very many such cases, that only some half dozen or so really recite the answers from their own independent knowledge. These serve as leaders; the others, sheep-like, follow. Still, by frequent repetition, even in this blind way, something gradually sticks to the memory, although the impression is always apt to be vague and undefined.

The method of reciting in concert is chiefly useful in reciting rules and definitions, or other matters, where the very words are to be committed to memory. The impression of so large a body of sound upon the ear is very strong, and is a great help in the matter of mere verbal recollection. Children too are very sympathetic, and a really skilful teacher, by the concert method, can do a great deal in cultivating the emotional nature of a large class.

Young children, too, it should be remembered, like all other young animals, are by nature restless and fidgety, and like to make a noise. It is possible, indeed, by a system of rigorous and harsh repression, to restrain this restlessness, and to keep these little ones for hours in such a state of decorous primness as not to molest weak nerves. But such a system of forced constraint is not natural to children, and is not a wise method of teaching. Let the youngsters make a noise; I had almost said, the more noise the better, so it be duly regulated. Let them exercise, not only their lungs, but their limbs, moving in concert, rising up, sitting down, turning round, marching, raising their hands, pointing to objects to which their attention is called, looking at objects which are shown to them. Movement and noise are the life of a child. They should be regulated indeed, but not repressed. To make a young child sit still and keep silence for any great length of time, is next door to murder. I verily believe it sometimes is murder. The health, and even the lives of these little ones, are sacrificed to a false theory of teaching. There is no occasion for torturing a child in order to teach him. God did not so mean it. Only let your teaching be in accordance with the wants of his young nature, and the school-room will be to him the most attractive spot of all the earth. Time and again have I seen the teacher of a primary school obliged at recess to compel her children to go out of doors, so much more pleasant did they find the school-room than the play-ground.

Quite the opposite extreme from the concert method, is that which, for convenience, may be called the individual method. In this method, the teacher examines one scholar alone upon the whole lesson, and then another, and so on, until the class is completed.

The only advantage claimed for this method is, that the individual laggard cannot screen his deficiencies, as he can when reciting in concert. He cannot make believe to know the lesson by lazily joining in with the general current of voice when the answers are given. His own individual knowledge, or ignorance, stands out. This is clear, and so far it is an advantage. But ascertaining what a pupil knows of a lesson, is only one end, and that by no means the most important end of a recitation. This interview between the pupil and teacher, called a recitation, has many ends besides that of merely detecting how much of a subject the pupil knows. A far higher end is to make him know more,—to make perfect that knowledge which the most faithful preparation on the part of the pupil always leaves incomplete.

The disadvantages of the individual method are obvious. It is a great waste of time. If a teacher has a class of twenty, and an hour to hear them in, it gives him but three minutes for each pupil, supposing there are no interruptions. But there always are interruptions. In public schools the class oftener numbers forty than twenty, and the time for recitation is oftener half an hour than an hour. The teacher who pursues the individual method to its extreme, will rarely find himself in possession of more than one minute to each scholar. In so brief a time, very little can be ascertained as to what the scholar knows of the lesson, and still less can anything be done to increase that knowledge. Moreover, while the teacher is bestowing his small modicum of time upon one scholar, all the other members of the class are idle, or worse.

Teaching, of all kinds of labor, is that in which labor-saving and time-saving methods are of the greatest moment. The teacher who is wise, will aim so to conduct a recitation that, first, his whole time shall be given to every scholar; and secondly, each scholar's mind shall be exercised with every part of the lesson, and just as much when others are reciting, as when it is his own time to recite. A teacher who can do this is teaching every scholar, all the time, just as much as if he had no scholar but that one.

Even this does not state the whole case. A scholar in such a class learns more in a given time, than he would if he were alone and the teacher's entire time were given exclusively to him. The human mind is wonderfully quickened by sympathy. In a crowd each catches, in some mysterious manner, an impulse from his fellows. The influence of associated numbers, all engaged upon the same thought, is universally to rouse the mind to a higher exercise of its powers. A mind that is dull, lethargic, and heavy in its movements when moving solitarily, often effects, when under a social and sympathetic impulse, achievements that are a wonder to itself.

The teacher, then, who knows how thus to make a unit of twenty or thirty pupils, really multiplies himself twenty or thirty-fold, besides giving to the whole class an increased momentum such as always belongs to an aggregated mass. I have seen a teacher instruct a class of forty in such a way, as, in the first place, to secure the subordinate end of ascertaining and registering with a sufficient degree of exactness how much each scholar knows of the lesson by his own preparation, and secondly, to secure, during the whole hour, the active exercise and coöperation of each individual mind, under the powerful stimulus of the social instinct, and of a keenly awakened attention. Such a teacher accomplishes more in one hour than the slave of the individual method can accomplish in forty hours. A scholar in such a class learns more in one hour than he would learn in forty hours, in a class of equal numbers taught on the other plan. Such teaching is labor-saving and time-saving, in their highest perfection, employed upon the noblest of ends.

V.
ON OBSERVING A PROPER ORDER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES.

Education may be defined to be the process of developing in due order and proportion all the good and desirable parts of human nature. On this point all educators are substantially agreed. Another truth, to which there is a general theoretical assent, is, that, in the order in which we develop the faculties, we should follow the leadings of nature, cultivating in childhood those faculties which seem most naturally to flourish in childish years, and reserving for maturer years the cultivation of those faculties which in the order of nature do not show much vigor until near the age of manhood, and which require for their full development a general ripening of all the other powers. The development of a human being is in some respects like that of a plant. There is one stage of growth suitable for the appearance and maturity of the leaf, another for the flower, a third for the fruit, and still a fourth for the perfected and ripened seed.

The analogy has of course many limitations. In the human plant, for instance, one class of faculties, after maturing, does not disappear in order to make place for another class, as the flower disappears before there can be fruit. Nor, again, is any class of faculties wanting altogether until the season for their development and maturity. The faculties all exist together—leaf, flower, fruit, and seed—at the same time, but each has its own best time for ripening.

While these principles have received the general assent of educators, there has been a wide divergence among them as to some of the practical applications. Which faculties do most naturally ripen early in life, and which late in life?

According to my own observation, the latest of the human powers in maturing, as it is the most consummate, is the Judgment. Next in the order of maturity, and next also in majesty and excellence, is the Reasoning power. Reason is minister to the judgment, furnishing to the latter materials for its action, as all the other powers, memory, fancy, imagination, and so forth, are ministers to reason, and supply it with its materials. The reasoning power lacks true vigor and muscle, the judgment is little to be relied on, until we approach manhood. Nature withholds from these faculties an earlier development, for the very reason, apparently, that they can ordinarily have but scanty materials for action until after the efflorescence of the other faculties. The mind must first be well filled with knowledge, which the other faculties have gathered and stored, before reason and judgment can have full scope for action.

Going to the other end of the scale, I have as little doubt that the earliest of all the faculties to bud and blossom, is the Memory. Children not only commit to memory with ease, but they take actual pleasure in it. Tasks, under which the grown-up man recoils and reels, the child will assume with light heart, and execute without fatigue. Committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the easiest of all tasks to the child. More than this. The things fixed in the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. Things learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired since attaining the age of manhood. The Creator seems to have arranged an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse. Now to reverse this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put shackles and restraints upon the memory, nicknaming and ridiculing all memoriter exercises as parrot performances, is to ignore one of the primary facts of human nature. It is to be wiser than God.

Another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very morning and spring-time of life, is Faith. I speak here, of course, not of religious belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to believe instinctively whatever is told him. That we all do thus believe until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no demonstration. Everybody's experience attests the fact. It is equally plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. How slow and tedious would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by experience and reason! On the contrary, how much is the acquisition of knowledge expedited, during these years of helplessness and dependency, by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood. The same infinite wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the constitution of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of faith, which alone makes the father's and mother's love efficacious towards its intellectual growth and development. Of what use were parents or teachers, in instructing a child which required proof for every statement that father, mother, or teacher gives? How cruel to force the confiding young heart into premature scepticism, by compelling him to hunt up reasons for everything, when he has reasons, to him all-sufficient, in the fact that father, mother, or teacher told him so?

It may seem trifling to dwell so long upon these elementary points. Yet there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle here laid down. Educators and systems of education, enjoying the highest popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act upon the theory, that the first faculty of the mind to be developed is the Reasoning power. Indeed, they are not far from asserting that the whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power, and they bend accordingly their main energies upon training young children to go through certain processes of reasoning, so called. They require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to reason out a rule for himself for every process in arithmetic or grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. To commit blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. All authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of reasoning. Children reason, of course. They should be encouraged and taught to reason. No teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a child's intellectual powers. But he will not consider this the season for its main, normal development. He will hold this subject for the present subordinate to many others. Moreover, the methods of reasoning, which he does adopt, will be of a peculiar kind, suited to the nature of childhood, the results being mainly intuitional, rather than the fruits of formal logic. To oblige a young child to go through a formal syllogistic statement in every step in elementary arithmetic, for instance, is simply absurd. It makes nothing plain to a child's mind which was not plain before. On the contrary, it often makes a muddle of what had been perfectly clear. What was in the clear sunlight of intuition, is now in a haze, through the intervening medium of logical terms and forms, through which he is obliged to look at it.

A primary teacher asks her class this question: "If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies?" A bright boy who should promptly answer "30" would be sharply rebuked. Little eight-year old Solon on the next bench has been better trained than that. With stately and solemn enunciation he delivers himself of a performance somewhat of this sort. "If I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, how many marbles can I buy with 5 pennies? Answer—I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies as I can buy with 1 penny. If, therefore, I can buy 6 marbles with 1 penny, I can buy 5 times as many marbles with 5 pennies; and 5 times 6 marbles are 30 marbles. Therefore, if I can buy 6 marbles with one penny, I can buy 30 marbles with 5 pennies."

And this is termed reasoning! And to train children, by forced and artificial processes, to go through such a rigmarole of words, is recommended as a means of cultivating their reasoning power and of improving their power of expression! It is not pretended that children by such a process become more expert in reckoning. On the contrary, their movements as ready reckoners are retarded by it. Instead of learning to jump at once to the conclusion, lightning-like, by a sort of intuitional process, which is of the very essence of an expert accountant, they learn laboriously to stay their march by a cumbersome and confusing circumlocution of words. And the expenditure of time and toil needed to acquire these formulas of expression, which nine times out of ten are to those young minds the mere dicta magistri, is justified on the ground that the children, if not learning arithmetic, are learning to reason.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not advocate the disuse of explanations. Let teachers explain, let children give explanations. Let the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes, receive a certain amount of attention. But the extreme into which some are now going, in primary education, is that of giving too much time to explanation and to theory, and too little to practice. We reverse, too, the order of nature in this matter. What it now takes weeks and months to make clear to the immature understanding, is apprehended at a later day with ease and delight at the very first statement. There is a clear and consistent philosophy underlying this whole matter. It is simply this. In the healthy and natural order of development in educating a young mind, theory should follow practice, not precede it. Children learn the practice of arithmetic very young. They take to it naturally, and learn it easily, and become very rapidly expert practical accountants. But the science of arithmetic is quite another matter, and should not be forced upon them until a much later stage in their advancement.

To have a really correct apprehension of the principle of decimal notation, for instance, to understand that it is purely arbitrary, and that we might in the same way take any other number than ten as the base of a numerical scale,—that we might increase for instance by fives, or eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens—all this requires considerable maturity of intellect, and some subtlety of reasoning. Indeed I doubt whether many of the pretentious sciolists, who insist so much on young children giving the rationale of everything, have themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in arithmetical notation. Many of them would open their eyes were you to tell them, for instance, that the number of fingers on your two hands may be just as correctly expressed by the figures 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15, as by the figures 10,—a truism perfectly familiar to every one acquainted with the generalizations of higher arithmetic. Yet it is up-hill work to make the matter quite clear to a beginner. We may wisely therefore give our children at first an arbitrary rule for notation. We give them an equally arbitrary rule for addition. They accept these rules and work upon them, and learn thereby the practical operations of arithmetic. The theory will follow in due time. When perfectly familiar with the practice and the forms of arithmetic, and sufficiently mature in intellect, they awaken gradually and surely, and almost without an effort, to the beautiful logic which underlies the science.

How do we learn language in childhood? Is it not solely on authority and by example? A child who lives in a family where no language is used but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. In other words, practice in language precedes theory. It should do so in other things. The parent who should take measures to prevent a child from speaking its mother tongue, except just so far and so fast as it could understand and explain the subtle logic which underlies all language, would be quite as wise as the teacher who refuses to let a child become expert in practical reckoning, until it can understand and explain at every step the rationale of the process,—who will not suffer a child to learn the multiplication table until it has mastered the metaphysics of the science of numbers, and can explain with the formalities of syllogism exactly how and why seven times nine make sixty-three.

These illustrations have carried me a little, perhaps, from my subject. But they seemed necessary to show that I am not beating the air. I have feared lest, in our very best schools, in the rebound from the exploded errors of the old system, we have unconsciously run into an error in the opposite extreme.

My positions on the particular point now under consideration may be summed up briefly, as follows:

In developing the faculties, we should follow the order of nature.
The faculties of memory and faith should be largely exercised and cultivated in childhood.
While the judgment and the reasoning faculty should be exercised during every stage of the intellectual development, the appropriate season for their main development and culture is near the close, rather than near the beginning, of an educational course.
The methods of reasoning used with children should be of a simple kind, dealing largely in direct intuitions, rather than formal and syllogistic.
It is a mistake to spend a large amount of time and effort in requiring young children formally to explain the rationale of their intellectual processes, and especially in requiring them to give such explanations before they have become by practice thoroughly familiar with the processes themselves.

VI.
TEACHING CHILDREN WHAT THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

It is not uncommon to hear persons declaim against teaching children what they do not understand. If by this is meant that children should not learn a set of words as parrots do, merely by the ear, and without attaching any idea to what they utter, no one will dissent from the propriety of the rule. But if the meaning is that they should learn nothing except what they fully comprehend, the rule certainly needs to be hedged in by some grave precautions.

There are indeed few things which any one, the oldest or the wisest, fully comprehends. Who knows what matter is? Certainly not the most eminent of philosophers. They do not pretend to know. We pick up a pebble. Who can tell what it is, absolutely? We say that it is something which has certain qualities. But even these we know mainly by negations. The pebble is hard, that is, it does not yield to pressure. It is opaque, that is, it does not transmit light. It is heavy, that is, it does not remain still, but goes towards the centre of the earth unless intercepted by some interposing body.

Who knows the meaning, absolutely, of a single article of the Creed? Certainly not the most eminent of divines. We know certain things about the great mysteries of the Godhead, and even these things we know, not directly, but by certain faint, distant analogies, and we express our knowledge in terms chosen mainly from Scripture and arranged with care by wise and learned men. These venerable formularies, containing the most exact verbal expression which the Church has been able to frame, of what the Scriptures teach about God and his ways, we commit to memory, and we repeat them with comfort and edification. But we do not pretend to penetrate the very essence of their meaning. Who by searching can find out God? One must be God himself to understand him.

We read that Christ was tempted of the devil in the wilderness. There are many things in this transaction which we may be said, in a certain sense, to know. But a man will not proceed far in analyzing this knowledge before he will discover that there are mysteries underlying the whole, which he cannot penetrate. He knows some of the surface relations. But the things themselves, in their essence, are unknown. Was Christ tempted, as the devil tempts us, by suggesting thoughts in the mind? Was the devil present in a bodily shape? Did he utter an audible voice, by undulating the air, as we do? Has he direct relations to matter, as we have? How could his offer of worldly power and riches be any real temptation to the Saviour, when Jesus knew that Satan had no power to make his offer good?

There are indeed few things, in revelation or out of revelation, in mind or in matter, which we really and fully comprehend. If, therefore, we are to teach children nothing but what they understand, we must either teach them nothing at all, or our rule must be materially qualified. No one knows absolutely but God. Among created beings, there are almost infinite gradations of intelligence, although the highest created intelligence begins its range infinitely below that of the Divine mind. A given formula of words, therefore, may express very different degrees of truth according to the degree of intelligence of the party using it.

A catechism or a creed may convey twenty different degrees of meaning to twenty successive persons, varying in age, character, and culture. Yet the very youngest and feeblest shall understand something of its meaning, while the wisest and oldest shall not have exhausted it. The young and feeble intellect, receiving a formula of truth with suitable explanations of its terms, takes in at once a portion of its meaning and gradually grows into a fuller comprehension of what it has received. A statement of doctrine received by a child at the age of five, conveys to him a few feeble rays of light. The same statement at the age of ten, means to him far more than it did before, while at twenty it is all luminous with knowledge.

The mind itself grows and expands, and with every addition to its own vigor and stature, does it find new truths in those expressive and pregnant formulas of doctrine with which it has from childhood been familiar. It is like looking at a material object, first with the naked eye, and then with glasses of continually increased magnifying power. The more we increase the power, the more we see in the same bit of matter. Yet no glass will ever reveal to us the very interior essence of even the smallest particle of dust. God only knows fully either any single thing or the sum of things. Because, however, we cannot see into the essence of a pebble or a grain of sand, shall we shut our eyes to it altogether? Shall we not look at it, first as an infant does, then as a child, then as a youth, then as a man, then as a philosopher? We can never see it as God does. But we shall see it with ever-growing powers of vision, until that which was to us at first only a rude mass becomes an exhaustless organized microcosm of wonders.

I do not advocate the overloading of children with verbal statements of abstruse doctrines, whether of religion or of science. Much less would I turn them into parrots, to repeat phrases to which they attach no meaning at all. But when it is demanded, on the other hand, that they shall learn nothing but what they understand, I demur. I ask for explanation of the rule. I insist that, every statement of truth which they learn, even the most elementary, contains depths which neither they nor their teachers can fathom. I insist that, both in science and religion, there are certain great, admitted elementary truths, reduced to forms of sound words with which the whole world is familiar; and that while these formularies contain many things which a child cannot understand, they yet contain many things of which even the youngest child has a fair comprehension. I insist that a carefully prepared religious creed or catechism, even though it contains many things beyond a child's present comprehension, is a fit subject for study. Memory in childhood is quick and tenacious. The treasures first laid away in that great storehouse are the last to be removed. They may be overlaid by subsequent accumulations, but they are still ready for use. Forms of sound words are certainly among the things which parents and teachers should store away in the young minds of which they have charge. If the child does not understand all that he thus places in his memory, he understands portions of it just as he sees certain qualities of the pebble which he holds in his hand, and he will see and understand more, as his mind expands and his powers of spiritual vision increase.

VII.
CULTIVATING THE MEMORY IN YOUTH.

Many educators now-a-days are accustomed to speak slightly of the old-fashioned plan of committing to memory verses of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, creeds, and other formulas of doctrine and sentiment in religion and science. Many speak disparagingly even of memory itself, and profess to think it a faculty of minor importance, regarding its cultivation as savoring of old-fogyism, and sneering at all memoriter exercises among children as the chattering of parrots. It is never without amazement that I hear such utterances. Memory is God's gift, by which alone we are able to retain our intellectual acquisitions. Without it, study is useless, and education simply an impossibility. Without it, there could be no such thing as growth in knowledge. We could know no more to-day than we knew yesterday, or last week, or last year. The man would be no wiser than the boy. Without this faculty, the mind would be, not as now like the prepared plate which the photographer puts in his camera, and which retains indelibly on its surface the impressions of whatever objects pass before it; but would rather be like the window pane, before which passes from day to day the gorgeous panorama of nature, transmitting with equal and crystalline clearness the golden glory of the sun, the pale rays of the moon and stars, the soft green of meadow and woodland, images of beauty and loveliness, of light and shade, from every object on the earth and in the heavens; but retaining on its own surface not a line or a tint of the millions of rays that have passed through its substance, and remaining to the end the same bit of transparent glass, unchanged, unprofited by the countless changes it has received and transmitted.

Memory alone gives value to the products of every other faculty, stamping them with the seal of possessorship, and making them truly ours. In vain reason forges its bolts, in vain imagination paints its scenes, in vain the senses give us a knowledge of the shapes and forms of external nature, in vain ideas of any sort or from any source come into our minds, unless we have the power to retain and fix them there, and make them a part of our accumulated intellectual wealth. To do this is the office of memory, and whatever increases the activity and power of the memory, gives at once value and growth to every other power.

Memory has been well called the store-house of our ideas. The illustration is true not only in its main feature, but in many of the minor details. The value of what a man puts away in a store-house depends much upon the order and system with which the objects are stored. The wise and thrifty merchant has bins and boxes and compartments and pigeon-holes, all arranged with due order and symmetry, and every item of goods, as it is added to his stock, is put away at once in its appropriate place, where he can lay his hands upon it whenever it is wanted. There should be a like method and system in our mental accumulations. The remembrance of facts and truths is of little value to us unless we can remember them in their connections, and can so remember them as to be able to lay our hands upon any particular thought or fact just when and where it is wanted. Many persons read and study voraciously, filling their minds most industriously with knowledge, but such a confusion of ideas prevails throughout their intellectual store-house, that their very wealth is only an embarrassment to them. The very first rule to be observed, therefore, in cultivating the memory, is to reduce our knowledge to some system. Those who are charged with the training of the young should seek not only to store their minds with ideas, but to present these ideas to them in well ordered shapes and forms, and in due logical order and coherence. Hence the peculiar value of requiring children at the proper age to commit to memory the grand formulas of Christian doctrine, on which, in every church, its wisest and ablest men have expended their strength in placing great truths in connected and logical order and dependence. The creeds and catechisms of the Christian church are among the best products of the human intellect as mere specimens of verbal statement, and are valuable, if for nothing else, as a means for exercising the memory. A child who has thoroughly mastered a good catechism has his intellectual store-house already reduced to some order and system. His mind is not the chaos that we so often find in those children who are gathered into our mission schools.

The objects that are put away for safe-keeping differ in one respect from those things which are stored away in the memory. The material object is the same, whether we visit and inspect it from day to day or not. The banker's dollars are not increased in fineness or value by his handling them over carefully every day. Not so with intellectual coin. The more frequently we re-examine our knowledge and pass it under review, the more does it become fixed in its character, the more full and exact in its proportions. Handling it does not wear it out. Even giving it away does not diminish it. In short, so far as the cultivation of the memory is concerned, the next best thing we can do, after reducing our knowledge to due order, is to give it a frequent and thorough re-examination. Constant, almost endless repetition is the inexorable price of sound mental accumulation.

A distinction is to be made between memory as a power of the mind and the remembrance of particular facts. One or two examples will illustrate this difference. The late Dr. Addison Alexander, of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, had memory as an intellectual power to a degree almost marvellous. The following instance may be cited. On one occasion, a large class of forty or fifty were to be matriculated in the Seminary in the presence of the Faculty. The ceremony of matriculation was very simple. The professors and the new students being all assembled, in a large hall, each student in turn presented himself before the professors, had his credentials examined by them, and if the same proved satisfactory, entered his name in full and his residence, in the register. When the matriculation was complete and the students had retired, there was some bantering among the professors as to which of them should take the register home and prepare from it an alphabetical roll,—a work always considered rather tedious and irksome. After a little hesitation, Dr. Alexander said, "There is no need of taking the register home; I will make the roll for you;" and, taking a sheet of paper, at once, from memory, without referring to the register, and merely from having heard the names as they were recorded, he proceeded to make out the roll, giving the names in full and giving them in their alphabetical order. This was a prodigious feat of pure memory; for in order to make the alphabetical arrangement in his mind, before committing it to paper, he must have had the entire mass of names present in his mind by a single act of the will. Some of the wonderful games of chess performed by Paul Morphy are dependent in part upon a similar power of memory, by which the player is enabled to keep present in his mind, without seeing the board, a long series of complicated evolutions, past as well as prospective and possible. The same is true of every great military strategist.

In all these cases, there is an act of pure memory, a direct and positive power of summoning into the mind its past experiences, such as can only take place where, either by natural gift or by special training, the memory as a faculty of the mind is in a high state of vigor. But there are other cases, in which a man is enabled to recall a great number of particular facts by a species of artifice or trick, which does not imply any special mental power, and the study of which does not tend, in any marked degree, to develop such power. More than thirty years ago, the late Professor Dod, of Princeton College, in lecturing to a class on the subject of light, was explaining the solar spectrum, and after exhibiting the solar ray, divided into its seven primary colors, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, said, "If you will form a mnemonic word of the first letters of each of these words, you will be able, without further effort, to remember the order of the prismatic colors the rest of your lives," and he accordingly wrote upon the board and pronounced the uncouth and almost unpronounceable word, Vibgyor, which probably not one of us has ever forgotten. An ingenious Frenchman some years ago traversed the country and collected large audiences by his exhibitions of skill in this species of artifice, and by undertaking to initiate his hearers in the method of remembering prodigious numbers of historical facts by means of such artificial contrivances. Mnemotechny, the name which he gave to his invention, is merely a trick of the memory. It is a means of remembering a particular set of facts or things by the aid of contrivances purely artificial and arbitrary. Its possession does not imply, and its cultivation does not produce, real mnemonic power. It undoubtedly has its uses. But it is rather wealth gained by a lottery ticket than a wealth-producing power acquired by wise habits of business.

In teaching the young, it is well not to neglect either of these principles. We should give our children from time to time ingenious and interesting contrivances for remembering important facts. These contrivances, if judicious in plan and execution, will be great helps to them. We may in this way bridge over the difficulty of remembering many of the important facts and dates in history.

I would not discourage these artificial methods. Though they are mere tricks, they are valuable. But they have by no means the same value as those methods of teaching which cultivate and produce true mnemonic power. This power, like every other mental power, is given in unequal measure to different individuals. Like every other mental power, also, it grows mainly by exercise. No power of the mind is more capable of development. I have mentioned some things which tend to the growth of this power, such as presenting knowledge to children in logical and orderly arrangement, and frequent re-examination of knowledge already obtained. Perhaps there is no quickener and invigorator of the memory equal to that of reciting to a judicious teacher before a large class of fellow-students. By a proper and skilful use of the art of questioning, under the excitement of answering before a large class, the mnemonic power is subjected to a healthy and invigorating test, and all such exercises promote powerfully the mental growth. A child may absorb knowledge by mere solitary reading and study, just as a sponge absorbs water, but the knowledge so acquired readily evaporates, or is squeezed out. Something is needed to fix in the mind the knowledge that has been lodged there, and no process is more effectual to this end than that of class recitation. It is by telling other people what we have learned, that we learn it more effectually, and make it more completely our own. A good teacher, by good methods of recitation, can do more than all other persons and all other things to secure a sound and healthy growth of memory in the young.

Another thing highly necessary in cultivating a really good memory, is attaining the utmost possible clearness in our ideas. If the knowledge, when it first comes into the mind, is clearly and sharply defined, so that we really know a thing, instead of having vague and confused notions about it, we shall be the more likely to remember it permanently. Nothing is more conducive towards giving these sharp and definite impressions than the use of visible illustrations. Actual exhibition before a class of the objects talked about, actual experiments of the operations described, and the constant use of the chalk and the blackboard, presenting even abstract truths in concrete and visible symbols, as is done in algebra, chemistry, and logic, are among the means by which, chiefly, knowledge becomes well defined to the mind. Such is the constitution of the mind, that we have a clearer apprehension of what we see than of what comes to us through any other sense, and the knowledge which comes to us by means of the sight, is, of all kinds of knowledge, the most lasting and the most easily recalled. Hence, in teaching, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of visible illustration.

Another condition extremely favorable to the growth of memory, is the existence of a considerable degree of mental excitement at the time that knowledge enters the mind. Metals weld easily only at a white heat. If we would obtain a vigorous grasp of knowledge, and incorporate it thoroughly into our other mental products, so that it shall become really ours, there should be the glow of mental heat at the time of our acquiring such knowledge. Ideas that come into the mind when we are in an apathetic state, make no permanent lodgment. Hence the importance of exciting a lively interest in that which is the subject of study. If the teacher has failed to excite this interest, and finds in his class no animation, no sympathy, no eagerness of attention, he may be sure that he is not accomplishing much. The child must, if possible, acquire a fondness for that which is to be remembered. Love, in fact, is the parent of memory.

VIII.
KNOWLEDGE BEFORE MEMORY.

I have had frequent occasion to urge upon teachers the importance of cultivating the memory of their pupils. The old-fashioned plan of requiring the young to commit to memory precious truths, in those very words in which wise and far-thinking men have handed them down to us, has too much gone out of use. I have felt called upon, therefore, from time to time, to recall to the minds of teachers the unspeakable importance of early exercising the memory of children, and of storing their memories with wise sayings and rules. I would not take back anything I have said on this subject, but rather repeat and reiterate it. At the same time, I am aware that there is an extreme in this direction, and I therefore put in a word of caution.

The danger to which I refer is that of requiring children to commit mere words, to which they attach no meaning, or without their having any real knowledge of the things expressed by the words. Of course there is much in the formulas and rules of science that the immature minds of children cannot entirely comprehend, and I am far from saying that a child should commit nothing except what it can comprehend. But whatever in a rule or a doctrine they can understand, should be diligently explained to them, and the ingenuity of teachers should be exercised in awakening the minds of their scholars to the apprehension of real knowledge as a preliminary to the act of committing it to memory.

An example or two will illustrate my meaning. Children at school are required to commit to memory the tables of weights and measures. The exercise is one of acknowledged and indispensable importance. But it is possible for a child to repeat one of these tables with entire glibness and accuracy, pretty much as he would whistle Yankee Doodle, without any apprehension of the actual things which the terms of the table represent. He may learn to say "sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make a degree, three hundred and sixty degrees make a circle," with no more idea of the things expressed by this formula of words, than the parrot who has been taught to say, "You are a big fool." If the teacher will show the child an actual circle, with the degrees, minutes, and seconds marked, and will let him count them for himself, so that he has a real knowledge of the things, he will then not only commit this formula of words to memory more easily, but the knowledge itself will promote his mental growth. He will be feeding on real knowledge, not on its husks. So in learning about inches, feet, yards, rods, and miles, let the teacher, with foot-rule and yard-stick, show what these measures really are, let him by some familiar instance give the child an idea of what a mile is, and then let the memory be invoked to store up the knowledge gained. So with ounces, pounds, and hundred-weights. So with gills, quarts, and gallons. The common weights and measures are as necessary in the school-room as are spelling-books and arithmetics. The actual weights and measures, so far as possible, should be exhibited, should be seen and handled, and the child's mind made to grasp the very things which the terms express, that is, he should first get real knowledge, and then he should store his memory with it in exact words and forms of expression.

This is the true mental order. Knowledge first, then memory. Get knowledge, then keep it. Any other plan is like attempting to become rich by inflating your bags with wind, instead of filling them with gold, or attempting to grow fat by bolting food in a form which you cannot digest.

Some teachers, in their fear of cramming children with words, spend their whole time and energy in awakening thought, and none in fixing upon the memory the thoughts which have been awakened. They are so much afraid of making children parrots, that they discard rules entirely in teaching, or require pupils to frame rules for themselves. This is to go into the opposite extreme. The rules and formulas of science require the greatest care and consideration, and a large and varied knowledge. Few even of men of learning and of those specially skilled in the meaning of words and the use of language, are qualified to frame scientific rules and propositions. To suppose that young children, just beginning to feel their way into any department of science, are competent to such a task, is simply absurd. Yet this is by no means uncommon. A teacher will conduct a boy intelligently and skilfully through the process of doing a sum in arithmetic, or analyzing a sentence in grammar, and then say to him, "Now, form a rule for yourself, stating how such things should be done." The first step here is right. Take your pupil by the hand, and conduct him through the process or thing to be done. This is necessary to enable him to understand the rule. But when he thus gets the idea, then give him the rule or principle, as it is laid down in the book, in exact and well considered words, and let him commit those words thoroughly to memory, without the change or the omission of a word or a letter.

What is thus true as to the method of teaching the common branches of knowledge, is equally true in the study of religious knowledge. I would not set a child to framing a creed or a catechism, nor, on the other hand, would I require him to commit such formulas to memory, without making some attempt to awaken in his mind previously an apprehension of the ideas which the creed or formula contains. I do not say that a child's mind is competent to grasp all the truths embraced in these symbols. But there is no portion of any religious creed or catechism that I have ever seen, some of the terms of which are not capable of being apprehended by children. A wise teacher, in undertaking to indoctrinate a child in such a formula, will begin by showing him as far as possible what the words mean, by exciting in him ideas on the subject, by filling his mind with actual knowledge of the truths contained in the formula. Then, when the words of the formula have become to the child's mind instinct with meaning and life, the teacher will pause to stamp them in upon the memory. That is the way to study a catechism. First, give the child, so far as possible, the meaning, then grind the words into him. Do not set him to making a catechism; do not let him stop at understanding the meaning, without committing the words.

Two phrases will cover the whole ground. Knowledge before memory. Memory as well as knowledge.

IX.
THE POWER OF WORDS.

Words govern the world. Let any one who doubts it, canvass the motives by which his own action is decided. Considerations are presented to his mind, showing him that a certain course of conduct is right, or good, or expedient, or pleasant, and he adopts it. The considerations presented to his mind decide his action. But those considerations are in the form of arguments, and those arguments exist in words. The true original power, indeed, is in the thought. It is the thinker who generates the steam. But thought unexpressed accomplishes nothing. The writer and the speaker engineer it into action.

Thought, indeed, even in the mind of its originator, exists in words. For we really think only in words. Much more, then, must the thought have some verbal expression, written or spoken, before it can influence the opinions or the actions of others. A man may have all the wisdom of Solomon, yet will he exercise no influence upon human affairs unless he gives his wisdom utterance. Profound thinkers sometimes, indeed, utter very little. But they must utter something. They originate and give forth a few thoughts or discoveries, which minds of a different order, writers and talkers, pick up, reproduce, multiply, and disseminate all over the surface of society. When a man unites these two functions, being both an original thinker and a skilful and industrious writer, the influence which he may exert upon his race is prodigious. If any one, for instance, would take the pains to trace the influences which have sprung from such a man as Plato, he would have an illustration of what is meant. Plato, while living, had no wealth, rank, or position of any kind, to add force to what he said or did. Whatever he has done in the world, he has done simply by his power as a thinker and a writer. There were many Grecians quite as subtle and acute in reasoning as he. But their thoughts died with them. Plato, on the other hand, was an indefatigable writer, as well as an acute and profound thinker. He gave utterance to his ideas in words which, even in a dead language, have to this day a living power. When Plato was dead, there remained his written words. They remain still. They have entered successively into the philosophies, the creeds, and the practical codes, of the Grecian world, the Roman, the Saracen, and the Christian. At this very hour hundreds of millions of human beings unconsciously hold opinions which the words of that wise old Greek have helped to mould. The mere brute force of a military conqueror may make arbitrary changes in the current of human affairs. But no permanent change is ever made except by the force of opinion. The words of Plato have done more to influence the destinies of men than have a hundred such men as Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Four hundred millions of Chinese, in half the actions which go to make up their lives, are now governed by maxims and opinions which have come down to them from remote antiquity, from a man whose very existence is almost a myth. Those military heroes whose influence on society has been permanent have been propagandists as well as warriors. Opinions and codes have gone with, and survived, their conquering armies. The armies of the elder Napoleon were routed at Waterloo. But the Napoleonic ideas survived the shock, and they are at this day a part of the governing power of the world. It was the Koran—the words, and the creed of Mahomet—that gave to the Mahometan conquest its permanent hold upon the nations.

Spoken words have in themselves greater power than merely written ones. There is a wonderful influence in the living voice to give force and emphasis to what is uttered. But the written word remains. What is lost in immediate effect, is more than gained in the permanent result. The successful writer has an audience for all time. He being dead still speaks. Men are speaking now, who have gone to their final account twenty centuries ago. Paul possibly may not have had the same influence with a popular assembly as the more eloquent Apollos. But Paul is speaking still through his ever-living Epistles. He is speaking daily to more than a hundred millions of human beings. He is exerting through his writings a power incomparably greater than that even which he exercised as a living speaker.

All men have not the commanding gifts of the apostle Paul. Yet after all, the main difference between ordinary men and men of the Pauline stamp, is not so much in their natural powers, as in the spirit and temper of the men, in that entire consecration to the service of Christ which Paul had, and which they have not. It is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished even by men of ordinary talents, when they have that zeal and single-mindedness which may be attained by one as well as by another. We are accountable for the talents which we have, not for what we have not. But let each man see to it that he uses to the utmost every talent which his Lord has committed to his trust.

How much, for instance, may be accomplished by a man who has a gift for addressing a popular assembly! Such a man by a few wise words, spoken at the right time and place, may do as much in five minutes, in pushing forward a general cause, as another man can do by the laborious drudgery of years. The words of the speaker touch the secret springs of action in a thousand breasts. He sends away a thousand men and women animated with a new impulse to duty, and that impulse is propagated and reproduced through hundreds of channels for long years to come.

Words are never entirely idle. They have at times a power like that of the electric bolt. They may sting like a serpent, and bite like an adder. In the ordinary intercourse of society, a man of good conversational powers may, even in discharging the customary civilities of life, put forth a large influence. The words dropped from minute to minute, throughout the day, in the millions of little transactions all the while going on between man and man, have an incalculable power in the general aggregate of the forces which keep society in motion.

As with spoken, so with written words. The man who knows how to weave them into combinations which shall gain the popular ear, and sink into the popular heart, has a mighty gift for good or evil. The self-denying and almost saintly Heber, by all his years of personal toil on the plains of India, did not accomplish a tithe of what has been accomplished for the cause of missions by his one Missionary Hymn. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that those few written words are worth more to the cause than the lives of scores of ordinary missionaries. How many anxious souls, just wavering between a right and a wrong decision, have been led to make the final choice, and to decide for Christ, by that beautiful hymn beginning "Just as I am, without one plea"? Who can doubt that the patient invalid of Torquay, in the hour that she penned those touching words, did more for the conversion of sinners than many a minister of the gospel has done in the course of a long and laborious life? What a fund of consolation for pious hearts through all time is laid up in the hymns of that other sweet singer, Mrs. Steele?

But as with spoken, so with written words, the great aggregate of their force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions, but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. But it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the real wonders of vegetation. So these words which we read, and think we forget, hour by hour, all day long, are continually sinking into the soil of the heart, and influencing imperceptibly the growth of the germs of thought. The aggregate of all these minute, unnoticed influences is prodigious, incalculable.

Whoever can put words together wisely, either by the tongue or the pen, has a precious talent, which he may not innocently lay up in a napkin. The gift, like that of wealth, is not his by right of ownership, but only as a steward. It is his as a means to do good for the honor of his Lord, and the welfare of his fellow-men. As I said in the beginning of these remarks, the world is governed by words. Let Christian men, by the industrious use of the gifts they have received, see to it that a greater proportion of this governing force in the world is contributed by the friends of Christ. Let them unceasingly fill up with the words of truth and righteousness every accessible channel of thought and opinion, and thus occupy till Christ come.

X.
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

The study of language has ever been considered a study of high importance, regarded merely as a means of intellectual cultivation.

There are obvious reasons for this. The analysis of language is the analysis of thought. Resolving complex forms of speech into simple ones, and again combining simple expressions into those which are complex, and investigating, alternately by logic and aesthetics, the varying properties of words and phrases, are operations which come nearer, perhaps, than any other in which we are engaged, towards subjecting spirit itself to the crucible of experiment. The study of grammar, the comparison of languages, the translation of thought from one language to another, are so many studies in logic and the laws of mind. The subtleties of language arise from the very nature of that subtle and mysterious essence, the human mind, of which speech is the prime agent and medium of communication.

The class of studies under consideration bears nearly the same relation to the spiritual that anatomy does to the bodily part of us. It is by the dissecting-knife of a keen and well-tempered logic, applied to the examination of the various forms which human thought assumes, that we most truly learn the very essence and properties of thought itself. It is this intimate, immediate, indissoluble connection and correlation between mind and language, between human thought and human speech, between the soul itself and the mould into which it is cast, that gives such importance to the general class of studies known as philological.

The study of language, more than any other study, tends to make the mind acute, discriminating, and exact. It tends also, in a most especial manner, to fit a person to train the minds of others to acuteness, discrimination, and exactness. The person who has learned to express a thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages; or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the present meaning of a word from its original starting-point in reason and fact, and mark intelligently its gradual departures and their causes; who can perceive the exact difference between words and phrases nearly synonymous, and who can express that difference in terms clear and intelligible to others,—that person has already attained both a high degree of intellectual acumen himself, and an important means of producing such acumen in others.

The study of language is, in the profession of teaching, like the sharpening of tools in the business of the mechanic. Words are the teacher's tools. Human knowledge, even before it is expressed, and as it is laid up in the chambers of the mind, exists in words. We think in words. We teach in words. We are qualified to teach only so far as we have learned the use and power of words.

XI.
CULTIVATING THE VOICE.

If we except the lower kinds of handicraft, nine-tenths of all that is done in the world is done by means of the voice,—by talking. It is by talking we buy and sell; by talking, the lawyer, the doctor, the minister, the teacher perform the chief of their functions; by talking, the intercourse and machinery of life are chiefly kept in motion. As it was by a word that creation was accomplished, as the worlds came into being and were moulded into shape, not by the hand, but by the omnific voice of God, saying, "Let there be light and there was light," so in this lower sphere of human action, the tongue is mightier than the hand. The moulding, propelling forces of society come from the use of words. By words, more than by all other means, we persuade, convince, alarm, arouse, or soothe, or whatever else leads men to action and achievement; and while written words are full of power, yet even these are feeble as compared with spoken words, the living utterances of the human voice. Not only so, but the manner of speaking, the tone and quality of the voice influence us quite as much as the words spoken.

Yet how strangely we neglect this wonderful instrument. The mechanic sees to it that his tools are as keen and strong as it is in the power of art and labor to make them. The sportsman spares no expense or care to have the articles that minister to his pleasure in the highest possible state of finish and perfection. How lavish we are in the purchase of instruments of music, and in keeping them properly tuned and cared for. Yet this most wonderful organ, the voice, which God has given to every one of us, and which is worth more to us than all the instruments of music, all the inventions of pleasure, all the tools of trade, that human skill has devised, is left for the most part in utter neglect, without intelligent guidance, its wonderful powers almost totally uncultivated and undeveloped. We all feel the sway that a well cultivated and modulated voice has upon us, its power to give us pleasure and win our assent, and yet the great majority of us neglect to cultivate in ourselves that which may give us such a power over others. We are not oblivious of other advantages. We strive to make ourselves acceptable and to increase our influence, by attention to dress, by the adornment of our persons, and by the cultivation of our minds, by stores of knowledge and by accomplishments of various kinds, while the voice, which more than anything else is the direct instrument of the soul, is treated with neglect.

We mumble and mutter what should come out clearly and distinctly; we speak with a nasal drawl, or in a sharp key that sets all the finer chords of sympathy ajar; we use just so much of the vocal power that is given us as is needed to express in the faintest way our most imperative wants, and indolently leave all the rest of its untold and exquisite resources to go to waste.

Mrs. Siddons once made a shopkeeper turn pale with affright and unconsciously drop his goods upon the counter, simply by the tone in which, by way of experiment, she asked him the price of a pair of gloves. Undoubtedly Mrs. Siddons had natural gifts of voice which do not belong to every one. But a great part of the wonderful fascination which she and the other members of that remarkable family exerted, was due to cultivation.

If ministers of the gospel, and others who undertake to influence the minds of a congregation on the side of religion, would give this matter more attention, they would find it very greatly to their own advantage and that of others. The manner in which the words of eternal life are read and uttered from the pulpit is often such as to kill all vitality out of them. It is not enough that a preacher should be a good theologian, and that his sermon contain sound and valuable thoughts. The influence which they are to exert upon the people, is largely dependent upon the voice which gives them utterance. A competent teacher of elocution is quite as important a part of the machinery of a theological seminary, as a teacher of Hebrew. Yet, in organizing our seminaries, this matter is usually entirely ignored.

XII.
EYES.

I have spoken much of blackboards, maps, pictorial cards, natural objects, and apparatus of various kinds, as among the urgent wants of the teacher. But there is one thing which he wants more than all these, and that is EYES. A good pair of eyes are to the teacher, in the government of his school, worth more than the rod, more than any system of merit or demerit marks, more than keeping in after school, more than scolding, reporting to parents, suspension, or expulsion, more than coaxing, premiums, and bribes in any shape or to any amount. The very first element in school government, as in every other government, is that the teacher should know what is going on in his little kingdom, and for this knowledge he needs a pair of eyes.

Most teachers, it is true, seem to be furnished with this article. But it is in appearance only. They have something in the upper part of the face which looks like eyes, but every one knows that appearances are deceiving. They look over a school or an assembly of any kind, and are vaguely conscious that things are going on wrong all around them, just as people sometimes grope about in a dark room filled with bats, and are aware that something is flitting about, but they have no power of seeing distinctly any one object. It is amazing how little some people see, who seem to have eyes.

The fact is, there is an entirely mistaken notion on this whole subject. Having the eyes open, and seeing, are two distinct things. Infants have their eyes open, but they do not see anything, in the sense in which that word is generally used. Light comes into those open windows, the moving panorama of external nature passes before them, but distinct vision, which recognizes and individualizes objects, is something more than a mere passive, bodily sensation. It is a mental act. It is the mind rousing itself into consciousness, and putting forth its powers into voluntary and self-determined activity. Nothing in the history of childhood is more interesting than to watch this awakening of the mind in infancy, to notice how the whole face brightens up when the little stranger first begins actually to see things.

The misfortune with many people is, that in this matter of vision they seem never to get beyond the condition of infancy. They go along the street, or they move about in a room, in a sort of dreamy state, their eyes open, but seeing nothing. A teacher of this kind, no matter what amount of disorder is going on before him, never sees any one particular act. He sees things in the mass, instead of seeing individual things. The difference between teachers in this faculty of seeing things is more marked probably than in any other quality that a man can have. Two teachers may stand before the same class. One will merely be aware that there is a general disorder and noise throughout, being unable to identify any scholar in particular as transgressing. The other will notice that John is talking, that James is pulling his neighbor's hair, that William is drumming on the desk with his fingers, that Andrew is munching an apple, that Peter is making caricatures on his slate, and so on.

To have this power of seeing things, it is not necessary that one should be sly, or should use stealth of any kind. Knowledge gained by such mean practices never amounts to much, and always lowers a teacher in the estimation of his scholars; it weakens instead of strengthening him. Whatever a teacher does in the way of observation of his scholars, should be done openly and aboveboard. And after all, more can be seen in this way, by one who knows how, than by any of the stealthy practices usually resorted to. Darting the eyes about rapidly in one direction and another, is not a good way to make discoveries. Seeing is accomplished, not so much by the activity of the bodily organ, as by mental activity. The man's mind must be awake. This in fact is the secret of the whole matter. The more the face and eyes are quiet, and the mind is on the alert, the more a man will see. Seeing is rather a mental than a bodily act, though of course the bodily organ is necessary to its accomplishment. To be a good observer, one must maintain a quiet and composed demeanor, but be thoroughly wide awake within.

XIII.
ERRORS OF THE CAVE.

Improvement comes by comparison. One of the most profound observations of Bacon is that in which he remarks upon the dwarfing and distorting influence of solitariness upon the human faculties. The man who shuts himself up in his own little circle of thought and action as in a cave, having no consort with his fellows, evolving all his plans from his own solitary cogitation, must be more than human if he does not become one-sided, narrow, selfish, bigoted.

A like result, but not so aggravated, is produced, when a man limits his range of thought and action to those of his own special calling or profession; when the merchant mingles only with merchants and knows only merchandise; when the teacher knows nothing but teaching and books; when the medical man spends every waking hour and every active exercise of thought upon his healing art; when any man forgets that, in the very fact of his being a man at all, he is something greater and nobler than he can possibly be in being merely a merchant, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or the possessor of any other one special art or faculty.

It is true, indeed, that in order to attain to eminence in any one department, a man must bend his main energies to that one thing; and he must give to it much solitary thought and study. But no department of action is isolated. No interest is unconnected with other interests. No truth stands alone, but forms a part in the great system of truth. Study or action, therefore, which is entirely isolated, must needs be dwarfed and distorted.

A man must go occasionally out of his own sphere in order fully to understand those very things with which he is most familiar. A man must study other languages, if he would hope fully to understand his own. A man must study more than languages merely if he would become a perfect linguist. The only way to understand arithmetic thoroughly is to study algebra. A parent who has only one child, and who gives his entire and exclusive attention to the study of that child, in order that he may, by a thorough understanding of its nature and disposition, be better able to teach and train it, will not be so likely to attain his object as he would if he were to spend a portion of his time in mingling with other children and in becoming acquainted with childhood generally. A teacher who should shut himself up in his own school-room, giving to it every moment of his waking hours, would not be likely to benefit so largely his own pupils, as if he were to spend a portion of his time in communing with other teachers and observing other methods besides his own. A teacher even who should mingle freely with those of his own profession, and get all the benefit to be derived from observation of the views and methods of other teachers, but should stop there, would not yet obtain that broad, comprehensive view, even of his own calling, and of the duties of his own particular school-room that he might have if he would travel occasionally beyond the walk of books and pedagogy, and become acquainted with the views and methods of men in other spheres of life, with merchants, lawyers, and doctors, with farmers, mechanics, and artisans.

It is only by mingling with those outside of our own little specialty that we are disenthralled from the bonds of prejudice. It is wonderful to see the change produced in the minds of men of different religious denominations, when by any means they are thrown much into the actual fellowship of working together in some cause of common benevolence. How, without any argument, merely by the fact of their being brought out to a different point of view, the relative magnitude and importance of certain truths change in their estimation! The points in which Christians differ become so much smaller; the points in which they agree become so much larger. The little stone at the mouth of the cave no longer hides the mountain in the distance.

Let the teacher, the merchant, the mechanic, the banker, the lawyer, the minister of religion even, still remember that he is a man, and that he can never reach a full and just estimate of his own position without sometimes going outside of it and placing himself in the position of other men.

XIV.
MEN OF ONE IDEA.

There is between the teacher and other operatives one obvious difference, arising from the difference in the materials upon which their labor is bestowed. That class of laborers whose toil and skill are exerted in modifying the forms of matter, succeed generally in proportion to the narrowness of the range to which each individual's attention is confined. It is possible (the writer has known it to be a fact) for the same person to sow the flax, to pull and rot it, to break it, hatchel it, spin it, warp it, weave it, dye or bleach it, and finally make it into clothes. I say this is possible, for I have seen it done, and I dare say many of my readers have seen the same. But how coarse and expensive is such a product, compared with that in which every step in the progress of production is made the subject of one individual's entire and undivided attention.

If we were to go into the factories of Lowell, or into any of the thousand workshops which are converting Philadelphia into a great manufacturing centre, we would find the manufacture of an article approaching perfection just in proportion to the imperfection (in one sense) of the individual workmen employed in its production. The man who can make a pin-head better and cheaper than any one else, must give his attention to making pin-heads only. He need not know how to point a pin, or polish it, or cut the wire. On the contrary his skill in that one operation increases ordinarily in proportion to his want of skill in others. His perfection as a workman is in the direct ratio to his imperfection as a man. He operates upon matter, and the more nearly he can bring his muscles and his volitions to the uniformity and the precision of a mere machine—the more confined, monotonous, and undeviating are his operations—the higher is the price set upon his work, the better is he fitted for his task.

Not so the instructor of youth. The material operated on here is of a nature too subtle to be shaped and fashioned by the undeviating routine of any such mechanical operations. The process necessary to sharpen one intellect may terrify and confound another. The means which in one instance serve to convince, serve in other cases to confuse. The illustration which to one is a ray of light, is to another only "darkness visible." Mind is not, like matter, fixed and uniform in its operations. The workman who is to operate upon a substance so subtle and so varying must not be a man of one idea—who knows one thing, and nothing more. It is not true in mind, as in matter, that perfection in the knowledge of one particular point is gained by withdrawing the attention from every other point. All truth and all knowledge are affiliated. The knowledge of arithmetic is increased by that of algebra, the knowledge of geography by that of astronomy, the knowledge of one language by knowing another. As no one thing in nature exists unconnected with other things, so no one item in the vast sum of human knowledge is isolated, and no person is likely to be perfectly acquainted with any one subject who confines his attention with microscopic minuteness to that subject. To understand thoroughly one subject, you must study it not only in itself, but in its relations. To know one thing well you must know very many other things.

Let us return then to the point from which we set out, namely: that one important difference between the teacher and other operatives arises from the difference in the objects on which they operate. The one operates upon matter, the other upon mind. The one attains perfection in his art by a process which in the other would produce an ignoramus, a bungler, a narrow-minded, conceited charlatan. Hence the necessity on the part of those who would excel in the profession of teachers, of endeavoring continually to enlarge the bounds of their knowledge. Hence the error of those who think that to teach anything well it is necessary to know only that one thing. That young woman who undertakes to teach a primary school, or even an infant class, has mistaken her calling if she supposes that because she has to teach only the alphabet or the "table card," she has therefore no need to know many other things. There are some things which every teacher needs. Every teacher needs a cultivated taste, a disciplined intellect, and that enlargement of views which results only from enlarged knowledge.

We all know how much we are ourselves benefited by associating habitually with persons of superior abilities. So it is in a still higher degree with children. There is something contagious in the fire of intellect. The human mind, as well as the human heart, has a wonderful power of assimilation. Every judicious parent will say: Let not my child be consigned to the care of an ill-informed, dull, spiritless teacher. Let it be his happy lot, if possible, to be under one who has some higher ambition than merely to go through a certain prescribed routine of duties and lessons; one whose face beams with intelligence and whose lips drop knowledge; one who can cultivate in him the disposition to inquire, by his own readiness and ability to answer childish inquiries; who can lead the inquiries of a child into proper channels, and train him to a correct mode of thinking by being himself familiar with the true logical process, by having himself a cultivated understanding. Such a teacher finds a pleasure in his task. He finds that he is not only teaching his pupils to read and to spell, to write and to cipher, but he is acquiring an ascendancy over them. He is exerting upon them a moral and intellectual power. He is leaving, upon a material far more precious than any coined in the Mint, the deep and inerasible impress of his own character.

Let me repeat then, at the risk of becoming tiresome, what I hold to be an important and elementary truth, that the teacher should know very many things besides what he is required to teach. A good knowledge of history will enable him to invest the study of geography with new interest. Acquaintance with algebra will give a clearness to his perceptions, and consequently to his mode of inculcating the principles, of arithmetic. The ability to delineate off-hand with chalk or pencil the forms of objects, gives him an unlimited power of illustrating every subject, and of clothing even the dullest with interest. Familiarity with the principles of rhetoric and with the rules of criticism, gives at once elegance and ease to his language, and the means of more clearly detecting what is faulty in the language of others. A knowledge of Latin or of French, or of any language besides his own, throws upon his own language a light of which he before had no conception. It produces in his ideas of grammar and of language generally, a change somewhat like that which the anatomist experiences from the study of comparative anatomy. The student of the human frame finds many things that he cannot comprehend until he extends his inquiries to other tribes of animals; to the monkey, the ox, the reptile, the fish, and even to the insect world. So it is with language. We return from the study of a foreign language invariably with an increased knowledge of our own. We have made one step at least from the technicalities of particular rules towards the principles and truths of general grammar.

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations. I have already said enough to explain my meaning. Let me say, then, to every teacher, as you desire to rise in your profession, as you wish to make your task agreeable to yourself or profitable to your pupils, do not cease your studies as soon as you gain your election, but continue to be a learner as long as you continue to be a teacher, and especially strive by all proper means, and at all times, to enlarge the bounds of your knowledge.

XV.
A TALENT FOR TEACHING.

There can be no doubt that some persons have a natural aptitude for teaching. As there are born poets, so there are born teachers. Yet the man born with the true poetic temperament and faculty will never achieve success as a poet, unless he add study and labor to his natural gift. So the man born with a talent for teaching needs to cultivate the talent by patient study and practice, before he can become a thoroughly accomplished teacher. No man probably ever showed greater native aptitude for anything, than did Benjamin West for painting. Yet what long years of toil and study it took for him to become a really great painter? In teaching, as in every other profession, while men doubtless differ as to their original qualifications and aptitudes, yet the differences are not so great as they are often supposed to be, and they are by no means so great as those produced by study and practice. The man who has no special gift for this employment, but who faithfully and intelligently tries to perfect himself in it, is sure to be a better teacher than the one who has the natural gift, but adds to it no special study and preparation. Indeed, if we exclude from consideration those very nice and delicate touches in education, which are so rare as to be quite exceptional, there is nothing in the business of teaching which may not be acquired by any person of average ability.

When, therefore, we see a teacher not succeeding in gaining the attention of his scholars, or in securing obedience and respect, or in bringing them forward in their lessons, we are not disposed to free such a person from blame on the plea of his having no natural aptitude for teaching. We would respectfully say to such a teacher: if you know not how to impart knowledge, learn how; if you have no tact, get it. Teaching is a business, as much as knitting stockings, or planting corn. Either do not undertake to teach at all, or learn how it is to be done.

If one-fourth of the labor bestowed upon the work of teaching were devoted to studying the business, the value of the remaining three-fourths would be quadrupled. It is painful to see the amount of hard work done in school with so little proportionate effect. If a man who knew nothing of farming, but who had a desire to be useful, were to dig a pit and bury therein a bushel of corn, and imagine that he was planting, his labor would not be wider of the mark than much that is bestowed in school. A man must learn how to do even so simple a thing as planting corn. Let the teacher also learn how to plant the seeds of knowledge, how to prepare the soil, how to open it for the reception of truth, where and when to deposit the precious grains.

I have no desire to discourage those faithful men and women who are so nobly striving to do good as teachers. But I cannot help expressing the regret that so much of this labor is without adequate result. Why should persons act so differently in this matter from what they do in any other? If a woman wants to make a pair of stockings, she goes to some other woman who understands knitting, and sees how it is done, and learns the stitches, tries and experiments, and studies the matter, until it is all familiar to her. So of any other ordinary business. Yet when it comes to teaching, anything like definite study or observation of the mode of doing it, is almost unknown! It is really no exaggeration to say that many teachers bungle in their work as egregiously as would a woman who should put yarn into a churn, and expect, after a proper amount of churning, to draw out stockings.

In our schools are many professional teachers of approved skill. Why should not a school-teacher, who is conscious of not succeeding as he would desire, spend an hour occasionally in observation? Find out the name of some teacher who is particularly successful, and look on while the work is being done, and if possible see how it is done.

Then again, there are books on the subject, in which the business of teaching is explained in all its branches. Get some of these books and read. The mere reading will not make you teachers. But it will set you to thinking. It will quicken your power of observation. It will help you to learn from your own experience.

Make a note of the difficulties you encounter, and the points in which you cannot accomplish what you desire. Very likely you will find these very difficulties discussed in the books on teaching which you are reading. If not, lay your difficulties before some friend who is a successful teacher, and get advice. Anything, rather than going on, week after week, without improvement. There is a way of interesting your class in their lessons, of securing good order and punctual attendance, of making the scholars learn. Only make up your mind that you will find out what that way is. If you think it cannot be done, of course it will not be done. If you have fairly made up your mind that it may be done, and that you can do it, it is half done already.

You have no idea how much more pleasant the work will be, when you have once learned how to do it. One reason why so many teachers desert the ranks, is the irksomeness produced by want of success. Few things are more intolerable than being obliged to do a thing while conscious of doing it in an awkward and bungling manner. On the other hand, almost any work is a pleasure, which one is conscious of doing well.

XVI.
TEACHING POWER.

Teachers differ greatly in their ability to bring a class forward in intellectual acquisition and growth. With one teacher pupils are all life and energy, they take hold of difficulties with courage, their ideas become clear, their very power of comprehension seems to gather strength. With another teacher, those same pupils, studying the same subject, are dull, heavy, easily discouraged, and make almost no progress. The ability thus to stimulate the intellectual activity of others, to give it at once momentum and progress, is the true measure of one's teaching power. It may be well to consider for a moment some of the conditions necessary to the existence and the exercise of this power.

In the first place, we can exert no great, commanding influence over others, whether pupils or not, unless we have in a high degree their confidence. Pupils must have faith in their teacher. I never knew an instance yet, where there was great intellectual ferment going on in a class, that the pupils did not believe the teacher infallible, or very nearly so. This principle of confidence in leadership is one of the great moving powers of the world. In teaching, it is specially important. This feeling may indeed be in excess. It may exist to such an extent as to extinguish all independence of thought, to induce a blind, unquestioning receptivity. Such an extreme is of course opposed to true mental progress. But short of this extreme point, there is almost no amount of faith that children can have in their teacher, that, if well founded, is not of the highest advantage. Seeing the firm, assured tread of father or mother, or of an older brother or sister, is a great aid to the tottering little one in putting forth its own steps while learning to walk. So the child is emboldened to send out its young, unpractised thoughts, by the confidence it has in the guidance and protection of its teacher. To acquire and retain the proper ascendancy over the mind of a child, two things are essential, ample knowledge and entire honesty. Shallowness and pretension may mislead for a while. But to hold a child firmly and permanently, the teacher must abound in knowledge, and must have thoroughly honest convictions.

The next condition to great teaching power is confidence in one's self. A timid, irresolute, hesitating utterance of one's own convictions fails to produce conviction in the minds of others. I do not recommend self-conceit. It is not necessary to be dogmatic. Yet a certain style of self-assertion, bordering very closely upon these qualities, is needed in the teacher. In the higher regions of science and opinion, there are of course many points about which no one, at least no one well informed, would undertake to speak with authority. Such subjects it becomes us all to approach with reverent humility, as at the best only inquirers after truth. But the case is very different with teachers of the common branches concerned in our present remarks. On these points the teacher ought to have a certainty and a readiness of knowledge, so as to be thoroughly self-reliant before the class. Teaching is like fighting. Self-reliance is half the battle.

Equally important with the former is it to have the affection of one's pupils. Writers on metaphysics now-a-days dwell much, and very properly, on the influence of the body upon the mind, and the necessity of a healthy condition of the former in order to the full clearness and strength of our intellectual apprehensions. There is a still more intimate connection between our moral emotions and our mental action. The wish is father to the thought, in more senses than that intended by Shakspeare. If the intellect is the seeing power of the soul, the affections are the atmosphere through which we look. The same object may appear to us very differently, as it is seen through the colorless medium of pure intellectual perception, or as it is enlarged and glorified by the mellowing haze of fond affection, or as it is distorted and obscured by the mists of prejudice and hate. When a child has a thorough dislike for a subject or for his teacher, the difficulty of learning is very greatly increased. Not only is the willingness to study weak or wanting, but the very power of mental perception seems to be obstructed. The power of attention, the power of apprehension, the power of memory, the power of reasoning, are all paralyzed by dislike, and are equally vitalized by love and desire. Mental action, in short, is influenced by the state of the heart as much as by the state of the body. If you do not expect great mental efforts from a child that is sickly, burning with fever, or racked with pain, neither may you expect the best and highest results from one whose heart is diseased and alienated, who approaches a subject with feelings of aversion and dislike, whose conceptions are clouded with prejudice.

A teacher of great intellectual force, and with an overbearing will, may push forward even a reluctant and a rebellious class with a certain degree of speed. On the other hand, a teacher who enjoys the unbounded love of his scholars, may accomplish comparatively little, on account of lacking the other qualities needed for success. The highest measure of success in teaching is attained only where these several conditions meet,—where the teacher has and deserves the full confidence of the scholars, where he has full confidence in himself, is self-reliant and self-asserting, and where at the same time he has the warm affection of his pupils. Love, after all, is the governing power of the human soul, as it is the crowning grace in the Christian scheme. Love is, in teaching, what sunshine and showers are in vegetation. By a system of forcing and artificial culture, the gardener may indeed produce a few hot-house plants, but for all great or general results, he must look to the genial operations of nature.

XVII.
GROWING.

Children often use the term "grown-up people." By it they mean persons who have come to the age of twenty, or twenty-one, and whose bodily growth is complete. But there are other kinds of growth, besides that of the body.

What is a "grown-up" teacher? It is not difficult, certainly, to find some, in every locality, to whom this term could not be applied, with any propriety. They have been engaged for years in the work, and yet they are the merest babes. They have no more skill than when they first took a class in hand. When a boy begins to use a penknife, he is very awkward. He cuts himself about as often as he cuts the stick. After a while, however, he learns to manage the matter better. He finds out how to handle the curious instrument with skill and even with elegance. But you will see teachers, so called, who seem never to make any of this progress in their work. They have no more idea now, than they had when they gave their first lesson, of what they must do to secure attention and silence, how they must manage to keep all the children busy, how to secure good attendance, or study of the lesson, how to gain affection and confidence, how to enforce order and obedience, how to do anything, except to sit, book in hand, and ask the questions one after the other round the class, and see that John, George, and James severally say the answers correctly. This is the idea of teaching with which they begin, and they make no progress towards anything better. They acquire no skill. They make no growth. They are "grown-up" bodily. But in all that pertains to teaching, they are still babes. They whittle as awkwardly and unskilfully as when the delicate instrument was first put into their clumsy fingers. They go on from year to year and learn nothing.

Some persons are born teachers, just as some are born poets or mechanics. That is, they are gifted with a natural aptitude for that particular work. But those most gifted by nature, are capable of improvement, and those having least natural gifts for teaching, may acquire a certain and a very considerable amount of skill, by proper observation and study. The point which I wish to make, and which I deem important, is, that teachers should not rest content with their present qualifications, whatever they may be, whether large or small. Let it be the aim of every one to be a growing teacher. We come short, if we are not better teachers this year than we were last. We should aim and resolve to be better teachers next year than we are now. Our education as teachers should never be considered as finished. Forgetting the things which are behind, let us ever press forward. Let us constantly aim upward. Skill in teaching admits of infinite degrees, and no one will ever be perfect in it. Efforts at improvement, if persistently followed up, are always rewarded with success, and success in such a work brings a most sweet recompense. What satisfaction is equal to that of feeling that one is steadily increasing in the power of guiding and moulding the minds of others? Growing skill in anything, even in works requiring mechanical ingenuity, brings joy to the mind. How much more intense and pure the joy, when there is a consciousness of growth in this higher department of mental power?

Will the teacher, who reads these paragraphs, consider the matter? Are you, as a teacher, growing? or are you working on in dull content in the same old routine? On your answer to these questions depend very largely, not only the welfare of your scholars and the amount of good you will achieve, but your own happiness and satisfaction in your work. The artist, who produces some great work of genius, has his reward not merely in the dollars which it may bring to his coffer, but in the inward satisfaction which successful achievement produces. The true artist is always struggling towards some unattainable ideal, and his joy is proportioned to the nearness of his approach to the imagined perfection. So in proportion as we approach in skill the great Teacher, will be our joy in the work itself, apart from our joy in the results.

To be a growing teacher requires a distinct aim to this end, and a resolute and persistent effort. It does not come by chance. It is not a weed that springs up spontaneously, and matures without culture. It is not the fruit of mere wishing. There must be will, A DETERMINED AND RESOLUTE WILL. Rules and theories will not accomplish it. There are books and essays in abundance on the art and practice of teaching. But back of means we must have, first of all, the propelling power. Have you made up your mind to be stationary, or have you resolved to go forward? Will you remain in the wilderness, or will you advance into the promised land and take possession? Are you a deliberate, predetermined, contented dwarf, or will you resolutely grow? You may never become a giant, but do not remain an infant.

If there is any one duty of the teacher more imperative than another, it is that of continued, persistent self-improvement. No element of progress is so efficient as a wholesome discontent. "I count not myself to have attained," says the great apostle of progress. To sit down self-satisfied with present attainments is in itself a sign that you have not yet risen much. It is to belong to the owls and the bats of the lower valleys. One must already have ascended to lofty heights before he can even see the higher Alps towering beyond.

The teacher who would improve must, in a good sense, be restless. He must bestir himself. He must study and read and experiment, attend teachers' meetings and conventions, and take teachers' papers, and find out what other teachers are doing and have done, ever remembering that improvement comes mainly by comparison.

XVIII.
LOVING THE CHILDREN.

Some teachers make the mistake of supposing that a love for the work and a love for the children are one and the same thing. The two things are certainly separable in thought, and they are often actually separated in action. It is of some importance to teachers to remember the difference.

We see persons every day struggling with all their might to accomplish certain results. They have certain ideas which they wish to realize, certain theories which they wish to verify. To bring about these results, is a matter of pride with them. So that the end is gained, the means to be used are a matter of comparative indifference. Their heart is set on the result, they care nothing for the machinery by which it is brought about. Now, so long as the work is of a nature which requires only the use of mechanical powers, or of mere brute force, it is all very well. The sculptor need not fall in love with the block of marble on which he is working, in order to realize from it the conception of his mind. The engine which carries us thirty miles an hour towards the goal of our desires, will not speed us more or less for not being an object of our affections. But every man has a natural and proper dislike to becoming a mere machine for carrying out the schemes of others. Children especially revolt at being treated in this way. If a teacher takes the charge of a class or of a school, for the purpose of showing to himself or to others how certain things may be done, the children are quick to find it out, and to resent it. No child, however humble or obscure, but feels indignant at being considered as a mere pawn upon a chess-board, or a mere wheel or pulley in some complicated piece of machinery. Every individual child is to itself the centre of all human interests, and if you are to have any real and abiding influence upon him, he must first feel that you have a regard for himself, in his own proper person, independently of any schemes or plans of your own.

You may love to see your children all present punctually, to see them making a good appearance, and by their orderly behavior and manners helping forward the school generally; you may love the work of teaching as giving you honorable and useful occupation. But something more than this is wanting. You must love the children. You must love each particular child. You must become interested in each child, not for what it is to you, or to the class, or to the school, but for what it is in itself, as a precious jewel, to be loved and admired, for those immortal qualities and capacities which belong to it as a human being. No matter how degraded or depraved or forbidding in appearance that child may be, it has qualities which, if brought out, may make it more glorious than an angel. If Jesus loved him, you may love him. Jesus did not stand off at a distance from the loathsome and filthy leper, while performing the miracle of healing. He first "touched" the leper, and said, "Be thou clean." We are sometimes too fastidious in our benevolence, and shrink too much from coming into contact with those whom we would befriend.

Little real influence is ever produced upon any human being, without creating between you and him a bond of sympathy. If we would work strongly and efficiently upon the minds of children, we must really love them, not in the abstract, not in a general way, but concretely and individually. We must love John and William and Mary and Susie, simply and purely because he or she is, in himself or herself alone, an object of true interest and affection. In looking over a school, it is not difficult to discover at a glance which teachers thus love their children. It speaks in every word from the lips. It beams in every look from the eyes. It thrills in every tone of the voice. It has a language in the very touch of the hand and the movements of the person.

Some persons are naturally more fond of children than others are. But those not naturally thus inclined may cultivate the disposition. They must do so if they mean to be teachers. No one is fitted to be a teacher, who has not learned to sympathize with the real wants and feelings of children. Pretence here is all wasted. Shams may do with grown persons sometimes, never with children. They have an instinctive perception of what is genuine and what is pretended, in professed love for them. In fact, the way to win the affection of a child is to love him, not to make professions of love.

It is not always the easiest thing in the world to exercise this love. A teacher may have the charge of a class of children whose appearance, manners, and dispositions are exceedingly forbidding, perhaps even loathsome. Yet observation and study will ordinarily discover some good quality even in the worst and most degraded. A talent for discovering what is good in a child is much more important in the work of elevating him, than the smartness at detecting and exposing his tricks, in which some teachers take pride. It is a bad sign, though not an uncommon one, to see evidences of cunning in a teacher. Better by far to be outwitted and duped occasionally, than to forfeit that character of perfect sincerity and straightforwardness which secures the confidence of a child. The teacher who would love his children, particularly if he happens to have been entrusted with an unpromising class, must learn to wear the spectacles of charity. He must cultivate the habit of seeing things in their best light. While not blind to faults, he must be prompt and eagle-eyed to spy out every indication of good. Above all, he must remember that no human soul, however degraded, is without some elements and possibilities of good, for whom there is the possibility that Christ died.

XIX.
GAINING THE AFFECTIONS OF THE SCHOLARS.

The importance of this point is not to be measured by the mere gratification it affords. It adds undoubtedly to the happiness of the teacher in his work, to know that his scholars love him. Nor is this a small consideration. The teacher has many vexatious rubs. He encounters much toil and self-denial; and whatever tends to mitigate these asperities, and to make his labor sweet, is for that very reason important. The teacher has, for a part at least of his reward, the enjoyment of a love as pure and unselfish as any known upon earth. He will doubtless go forward in duty, even where he fails of obtaining this precious foretaste of the heavenly bliss, and he has doubtless higher aims than any arising from mere gratification, of whatever sort. Yet a boon so great is not to be despised or ignored. The ardent love which scholars sometimes give to their teachers is a high gratification, and something to be greatly prized for the mere pleasure it gives.

And yet, after all, this is not its main value. The fact that children love their teacher, gives to the teacher almost unbounded influence over them. There is hardly a point, necessary to the success of a school or of a class, that scholars will not readily yield to a teacher whom they love. By this silken cord they can be drawn whithersoever the teacher wills. To please teacher, they will attend regularly, will come punctually, will be quiet and orderly, will learn their lessons, will be attentive to instruction. More than all this, many a child, by the love of an earthly friend, has been led to the love of his heavenly Friend. The young heart is opened to receive the Saviour, by the warmth of its love for one who so manifestly bears his image. Perhaps there is no one, not even excepting a mother, who can so easily bring the young to the Saviour, as the teacher who has thoroughly succeeded in winning his scholars' affections.

There is another consideration in this matter, not so weighty as the one named, yet of great importance, and the more worthy to be named, because it is generally not rightly understood. I refer to the fact that children will learn so much more readily under a teacher whom they love. Not only will they study better, and be more attentive, for the sake of pleasing their teacher, but by some mysterious process of the mind, love helps us to understand, as dislike disturbs and beclouds the understanding. When a child has a dislike or prejudice or ill-feeling of any kind against a teacher, or a subject of study, the effect upon the mind of the child is like that produced upon a spring of pure and sparkling water by stirring up the mud and sediment from the bottom. In the human organization the heart is at the bottom, and disturbing influences there cause us to see things through an impure medium. The calmness and serenity, produced by perfect love and trust, are the proper conditions for the right and best working of the understanding. We must get the heart right if we would see truth clearly, and that teacher who has won the love of his scholars has done much towards making the path of knowledge easy for them.

Let the teacher, then, aim to win the love of his scholars, first, because this love is in itself a boon to which the teacher has a rightful claim; secondly, because it gives him a powerful influence in moulding the character and habits of the children, and especially in bringing them to the Saviour; and, thirdly, because it helps the scholars intellectually, enabling them to understand better and to learn faster.

But how is this love to be gained?

Assuredly, not by demanding it as a right, or by fretting, complaining, or scolding because your scholars do not love you. Love only is the price for love. If you wish your scholars to love you, you must first love them, not pretend to do it,—children are quick to see through such pretences,—but really and truly love them.

Many teachers, however, sincerely love their scholars, and yet do not succeed in winning their affections. Something in their manner and appearance is repulsive. There is in the face of some good people a hard and forbidding look, at which the heart takes alarm and retires within itself. The young heart, like the young buds in spring-time, requires an atmosphere of warmth and sunshine. If we would draw forth their warm affections towards us, we must not only feel love towards them in our hearts, but we must wear sunshine in our faces. A pleasant smile, a loving word, a soft, endearing tone of the voice, goes a great way with a child, especially where it is not put on, but springs from a loving heart.

Some teachers in avoiding this hard, repulsive manner, run to the opposite extreme, and lose the respect of their scholars by undue familiarity. Children do not expect you to become their playmate and fellow, before giving you their love and confidence. Their native tendency is to look up. They yearn for repose upon one superior to themselves. Only, when the tender heart of youth thus looks up, let it not be into a region filled with clouds and cold, but into a sky everywhere pervaded with a clear, steady, warm sunlight. Let there be no frown upon your brow, no harsh or angry word upon your lips, no exacting sternness in your eye. Let the love which you feel in your heart beam forth naturally and spontaneously in loving looks and words, and you need not fear but that you will meet with a response.

XX.
THE OBEDIENCE OF CHILDREN.

There is much misapprehension as to the true nature of obedience. Wherein does obedience really consist? What is its essence?

Merely doing a specified act, which has been required, is not necessarily an act of obedience. A father may have a rule of his household that the children shall rise in the morning at five o'clock. A son who habitually disregards this rule, may rise at the appointed time on a particular morning, in order to join a companion on a fishing excursion, or for some object connected solely with his own pleasure and convenience. Here the external act is the one required. He rises at the hour enjoined by his father's command. But his doing so has no reference to his father's wishes. It is not in any sense an act of obedience. Something more than mere external compliance with a rule or a command is needed to constitute obedience. In other words, not only the act itself must be the one required, but the motive must be right.

If I am led to do what my father or my mother requires, by mere dint of coaxing, or by the expectation of cakes or pennies or promised indulgence of any kind, if it is a bargain, in which I give so much compliance for so much per contra of self-gratification, the compliance rendered is not an act of obedience. As well might a man profess to obey his neighbor, because he gives him a bag of oats for a bag of corn. A great deal of what passes for obedience in families and schools, is mere barter. Strip the matter of all glosses and disguises, and the naked truth remains, that children are hired to do what the parent or the teacher wants to have done. They do not obey, in any legitimate and wholesome use of the word. They are quiet when they should be quiet, they learn the lessons which they should learn, they abstain from whatever things they should abstain from, because they have learned that this is the only way to gain the indulgences which they desire. The parent and the teacher use a motive adequate to secure the outward act, but they do not secure obedience.

It is not obedience for a child to do a thing because his reason and conscience tell him that the act in itself, without reference to his parents' wishes, is right and proper. At least it is not filial obedience. I may be obeying my conscience, but I am not obeying my father. Many parents, who are above the weakness of bribing their children, satisfy themselves by reasoning with them. Far be it from us to say a word against any legitimate appeal to the reason and conscience of a child. Children, at the proper age, should be taught to reason and to judge for themselves, in regard to the right and wrong of actions, just as they should learn to walk alone, and not be forever dependent upon leading strings. Only, let it be understood that just so far as the child acts on its own independent judgment, the act is not one of filial obedience.

Obedience is doing a thing because another, having competent authority, has enjoined it. The motive necessary to constitute any act an act of obedience, is a reference to the will and authority of another. It is submission of our will to the will of another. The child receives as true what his parents say, and because they say it; so, he does as right what they command, and because they command it. That fact is, and in the first instance it should be, to the child's mind, the ultimate and sufficient reason for either believing or doing—for faith or obedience. This faith and obedience rendered to my earthly father, which is only partial and temporary, besides serving its own immediate ends, in securing a well-ordered household and my own best interests as a child, has the further end of training me for that unqualified faith and obedience, which I am to render to my heavenly Father, and which is of universal and permanent obligation. One object of the parental relation seems to be to fit the soul for this higher obedience. I must, however, learn to obey my father simply because he is my father, and because as such he has the right to command me, if thereby I am to learn, for a like reason, to obey my heavenly Father. No lower motive will secure the end.

Submission to parental authority is not always the instinctive impulse of childhood. Where this submission is not yielded, it must be enforced. Authority, in other words, requires sanctions. The father has no right to command, unless he has the right to punish in case of disobedience. Furthermore, if he does not, especially in the early childhood of his offspring, train them to a habit of real obedience and submission to authority, he does his children a great wrong. He deprives them of the benefit of that habit of obedience, which will be of the utmost value to them in their future religious life.

A man forbids his child to eat green apples. The child abstains. That abstinence is not necessarily an act of obedience.

He may abstain because his mother offers, in case of his doing so, to give him sugar-plums, and he prefers the sugar-plums to the apples. This is not obedience.

Or, his reason and experience may have taught him that the eating of green fruit will cause him sickness and pain, and so he abstains for the same reasons that his father, mother, or anybody else does. This is not obedience.

But children often have not the forethought to look at remote consequences, or they have not the strength of purpose to deny a present gratification for the sake of a distant good, and especially for a good of which they have only a vague idea through the representations of their parents or teachers. Suppose such a case. Suppose a child with a strong inclination and desire for the thing forbidden, and with no clear apprehension that there is anything wrong or hurtful in the indulgence, except in the fact that the father has forbidden it, and with no temptation of a higher indulgence as a reward for abstaining. If, in such a case, the child abstains, he performs a true act of obedience. He really subjects his will to the will of his father.

This kind of implicit obedience is greatly needed. It is to be secured just as our heavenly Father secures obedience to some of his laws. If a child thrusts his finger into the candle, he violates a law, and he instantly suffers for it. We are surrounded by many such laws, without the observance of which we could not live a day. To teach us obedience to these laws, the penalty of transgression is immediate and sharp. There are other laws of our physical well-being, the penalties of which are remote, and in regard to those we have room for the exercise and cultivation of our reasoning powers. Now in childhood, there are many things which a child should be taught to forbear doing as promptly as he forbears to thrust his hand into the fire. Yet for these things there is no natural penalty. Here the command of the parent should be interposed, and transgression should be promptly followed by penalty. The authority of the parent and the penalties by which he sustains it, guide the child during those years when reason and the power of self-denial are weak. But to make this discipline easy and effective, there should be no hesitation or uncertainty about the exercise of it. Parents often have to strain their authority, and use very largely their right of punishment, because they are so unequal and irregular in their methods of government. A child soon ceases to thrust his finger into the fire. Fire is not a thing which burns one day, and may be safely tampered with the next. So, if disobedience, invariably and promptly, without passion or caprice, and with the uniformity of a law of nature, brings such a penalty as to make the disobedience painful, there will be little transgression and little need of punishment. A child does not fret because he cannot play with fire. He will not fret because he cannot transgress a father's direct command, if he once knows that such commands must be obeyed.

XXI.
RAREY AS AN EDUCATOR.

Parents, teachers, and all who are charged with the duty of training the young, may learn important lessons from the example of the late Mr. Rarey. The principles on which the horse is rendered obedient and docile do not differ essentially from those to be employed in the government of children or of men.

Some of the accounts of Mr. Rarey's system, however, which have been published, are liable to mislead, and to foster a mischievous error. His procedure was eminently kind and gentle. The horse became fully assured that no harm was intended towards him. This conviction is essential to success in securing a perfect and willing obedience, whether from brute or human. But the distinctness with which this feature of the treatment was brought out in Mr. Rarey's exhibitions, led some apparently to think that this was the main, if not the only feature. Kindness alone, however, will not tame, and will not govern, brutes or men. There must be power. There must be, in the mind of the party to be governed, a full conviction that the power of the other party is superior to his own—that there is, in the party claiming obedience, an ample reserve of power fully adequate to enforce the claim. The more complete this conviction is, the less occasion there will be for the exercise of the power. The most headstrong horse, once convinced that he is helpless in this contest of strength, and convinced at the same time that his master is his friend, may be led by a straw.

Mr. Rarey went through various preliminary steps, the object of which was to make the horse acquainted with him, and to prevent fright or panic. But obedience was not claimed, and was not given, until there had been a demonstration of power—until the horse was convinced that the man was entirely too much for him. By a very simple adjustment of straps to the forefeet of the animal, he became perfectly helpless in the hands of his tamer. The struggle, indeed, was sometimes continued for a good while. The horse put forth his prodigious strength to the utmost. He became almost wild at the perfect ease and quietude with which all his efforts were baffled, until at length, fully satisfied that further struggles were useless, he made a complete surrender, and lay down as peaceful and submissive as an infant.

This point is of some importance. I do not underrate the value of kindness and love in any system of government, whether in the household, the school, the stable, the menagerie, or in civil society. But love is not the basis of government. Obedience is yielded to authority, and authority is based on right and power. The child who complies with his father's wishes, only because a different course would make his father grieve, or give his mother a headache, or because his parents have reasoned with him and shown him that compliance is for his good, or who has been wheedled into compliance by petty bribes and promises, has not learned that doctrine of obedience which lies at the foundation of all government, human and divine. God has given to the parent the right to the obedience of his children, and the power to enforce it. That parent has failed in his duty who has not trained his child, not only to love him, but to obey him, in the strict sense of the word, that is to yield his will to the will of a superior, from a sense of appointed subordination and rightful authority. This sense of subordination and of obedience to appointed and rightful authority, is of the very essence of civil government, and the place where it is to be first and chiefly learned is in the household. To teach this is a main end of the parental relation. The parent who fails to teach it, fails to give his child the first element of good citizenship, and leaves him often to be in after-years the victim of his own uncontrolled passions and tempers. The want of a proper exercise of parental authority is, in this age of the world, the most prolific source of those frightful disorders that pervade society, and that threaten to upturn the very foundations of all civil government. The feeling of reverence, the sense of a respect for authority, the consciousness of being in a state of subordination, the feeling of obligation to do a thing simply because it is commanded by some one having a right to obedience—all these old-fashioned notions seem to be dying out of the minds of men. The popular cry is, Don't make your children fear you. Govern them by love. Conquer them by kindness. Treat them as Mr. Rarey did his horses.

I protest against the notion. It is a mistake of Mr. Rarey's system, and it is not the true basis for government, whether of brutes or men. The doctrine may seem harsh in these dainty times. But, in my opinion, a certain degree of wholesome fear in the mind of a child towards its parent, is essential, and is perfectly compatible with the very highest love. I have never known more confiding, affectionate, and loving children, than those who not only regarded their parents as kind benefactors and sympathizing friends, but who looked up to them with a certain degree of reverence. The fear spoken of in the Bible, as being cast out by perfect love, is quite a different emotion. It is rather a slavish fear, a feeling of dread and terror. It sees in its object not only power but hostility. It awakens not only dread but hate. The child's fear, on the contrary, sees power united with kindness. It obeys the one, it loves the other. It is the exact attitude of mind to which Mr. Rarey brought the horse that was subjected to his management.

XXII.
A BOARDING-SCHOOL EXPERIENCE.

I have often wished I had the descriptive power of the man who wrote "The Diary of a Physician." My experiences in another profession have not been wanting in incident, often of a curious and romantic kind, and sometimes almost startling. But the "Diary of a Schoolmaster," to be read with interest, requires something more than a good basis of facts. He who writes it must have, also, graphic and narrative powers—a special gift, of which nature has been sparing to me. I had one experience, however, many years ago, so remarkable in some of its features, that perhaps the bare facts, stated in the simplest form, without artifice or embellishment, will be found worthy of perusal. The youth who was the principal actor in the scene which I am about to describe, has been dead these many years, and I believe the family have nearly all died out. The only survivor that I knew anything of ten years ago was then blind, and ill of an incurable disease. There would, therefore, perhaps be no harm in giving the youth's real name; but as the name is one widely known, and as it is always best to avoid unnecessary intrusion upon private affairs, I have concluded to use a fictitious name, both for the person referred to and for the place from which he came. In other particulars the following incident is a simple narration of facts.

At the time of which I am writing, I had a large boarding-school for boys, at Princeton, New Jersey. Particular circumstances gave me, for several years, quite a run of patronage from a town in one of the Western States, which for convenience I shall call Tompkinsville. Among those who applied for admission from this town were two brothers, Bob and Charlie Graham. Bob was only ten years old. Charlie was fourteen, and as mature as most boys at nineteen. Mature, I mean, not so much in his intellectual development, for in that respect he was rather behindhand, but in his passions, and in his habits of independent thought and action.

I had many misgivings about the propriety of receiving these boys into the school. Most of those that I had already from Tompkinsville were of the fire-eating class, whom it had taken all my skill as a disciplinarian to bring into subjection, and I did not know what might be the effect of adding to their number two such combustible youths as these Grahams were reputed to be. Tompkinsville, indeed, had long been notorious for the fiery and lawless character of its inhabitants. While containing many most estimable families, where a generous and warm-hearted hospitality reigned supreme, yet no town, probably, in all the Western States witnessed annually a greater number of street-fights and other deeds of violence of the most desperate character. No family in Tompkinsville were more noted than the Grahams, on the one hand for the passionate warmth of their attachments, and on the other for the fierceness and violence of their resentments. Nothing was too much for them to do for you when their affections were touched. On the other hand, no law, human or divine, seemed to restrain them when their blood was up. When roused by what they regarded as an insult, they were human tigers, no less in the quickness than in the desperate ferocity of their anger. The father once, in open court, in a sudden rage, actually strode over the tables and heads of the lawyers, and seizing the presiding judge by the collar, dragged him from the bench and horsewhipped him in the presence of all his officials. Charlie himself, of whom I am writing, gave, about two years after leaving school, a similar demonstration of violence. Hearing that a young man, who was a fellow-student of his in a law office, had done something insulting, Charlie drew up a formal written apology and presented it to the young man to sign, intending afterwards to post it. On the young man's refusing to sign the paper, Charlie drew a weapon of some kind and sprang upon him. The young man being several years older, and very large and powerful, had no difficulty in disarming his assailant, throwing him upon the floor and holding him there. While thus down upon his back, bound hand and foot, and completely at the mercy of his antagonist, Charlie still demanded, as fiercely as ever, the signing of the "apology," giving the young man, as the only alternative, either to kill him or to be killed. "If you let me up alive, I will shoot you at sight, as sure as my name is Charles Graham." Knowing the desperate character of the family, and feeling too well assured of his own social position to care for any effect the signing of such a paper might have, the young man courageously let the ruffian up and signed the apology. Two days after, Charlie came back to the office, thoroughly mortified and penitent for his outrage, voluntarily gave up the paper, and apologized in the amplest manner for his folly.

I might enumerate other instances by the score, were it necessary, to show the character of the boy with whom I had to deal. But these are probably sufficient. His passions were as quick as gunpowder, and as indiscriminate. Had I known all that I afterwards knew in regard to his disposition and his antecedents, I certainly would not have undertaken the charge of his education.

The Grahams had been with me nearly a year without the occurrence of anything to attract attention or call for discipline. The school had considerable reputation among the people of Tompkinsville for the strictness of its discipline. Though the relations between the pupils and myself were for the most part thoroughly kind and friendly, yet it was well understood by every boy who entered school that the will of the Principal was supreme. Mr. Graham had probably brought his boys to the school for that very reason. The routine of obedience had been so thoroughly established, that his boys, he thought, would submit through mere force of example. Bob was too young to give any uneasiness. He fell, of course, into many of the peccadilloes of boys of his age, and received, without demur, the treatment of a little boy. Charlie, for a long time, was almost a model of propriety. He was diligent in his studies, and observed the rules of the school with scrupulous care. He was fair, almost girlish, in appearance, and gentle in his speech. No one, merely observing the quiet, modest boy, going about his usual routine of duty, without noise or turbulence, would have dreamed of the sleeping volcano that lay beneath this placid exterior.

About the middle of the second term I began to notice in Charlie symptoms that I did not like. The harness evidently chafed him somewhere, and there was no telling when he might kick out of the traces. The crisis at length came. One morning, when the boys were in the washroom, under the charge of the senior teacher, Charlie, with what precise provocation I could never ascertain, drew back his basin of water and threw it full into the teacher's face.

Here was a case. We were about to have an explosion. Evidently the young fire-eater's blood was up. He was bent on having "a scene;" and, while his hand was in, he would quite likely make up for all the long months of peaceful inaction. All the tiger within him stood revealed.

The matter was reported to me of course. After some little thought, my plan was chosen. Not a word was said on the subject for several hours. Meals, play-time, study-hours, lessons, everything went on as usual. At length, about eleven o'clock, Charlie was summoned, not to the principal's desk, in the public school-room, but to my private office, in a remote part of the premises. As he entered the quiet apartment, it was evident that the intervening hours of reflection had not been lost upon him. He was pretty sure, of course, that I had sent for him in consequence of the occurrence of the morning. Still he was not certain. Not a word had been uttered in school on the subject—no allusion to it even. Altogether there was something about the affair that mystified him.

The following brief dialogue ensued.

"Where are your skates, Charlie?"

"In my box in the play-room, sir."

"Where is your sled?"

"That is hanging up in the outer shed."

"Where is your fishing-line and your ball?"

"They are in the play-room."

"I wish you would get these and all your other playthings together before dinner. Peter (this was the head waiter) has collected your boots and shoes, and Sarah (the seamstress) has got your clothes together and packed your trunks. I have made out your accounts, and will be ready to send you home to your father by the afternoon train. You may help Bob also to collect his playthings; he has not done anything wrong, but he is so young I think your father would not like to have him here alone so far from home."

All this was said in a tone as utterly emotionless as I would have used if asking him whether he would be helped to beef or lamb at table.

Charlie was taken aback. If I had attempted to chastise him, if I had even used towards him the language of invective or reproach, he could have met the case. But here was an issue which he had never contemplated. After a moment of blank amazement, he said:

"Mr. H., I don't want to go home thus. It will grieve my father, and it will be a lasting stigma to me in Tompkinsville, where it is counted an honor to belong to this school. I know I have done wrong, but can't you inflict some other punishment? I will submit to anything rather than be sent home in this way. Put me in 'exile' and at the 'side-table,' for three days, or any time you please!"

This was an extreme penalty, sometimes used in school for very grave offences. The boy who was subject to it was obliged to stand at a table by himself in the dining-room and eat bread and water, while the other boys and their teachers were at their meals. Besides this, during the continuance of the penalty the culprit was not allowed to go upon the play-ground, or to speak to any one, nor was any one allowed to speak to him, under the penalty of being himself similarly punished. The punishment was, of course, a severe one in itself, and was very mortifying to a boy of high spirit. It was only resorted to in extreme cases, and was limited to one day. Charlie begged that I would "exile" and "side-table" him for a week, if I pleased; only not send him home thus.

"No, Charlie; I am not sure that your father would approve of your being thus publicly disgraced before the school and the family, nor am I myself sure that it would be right in the case of a boy so far advanced towards manhood as you are. In assuming the charge of you, I never contemplated anything in our intercourse but such as occurs between gentlemen. Since I have been mistaken in my estimate of you, let our intercourse cease. It would not alter your character to subject you to a humiliating punishment before the assembled school. If it were your brother Bob, the case would be different. But you are almost a man. You have been treated here, as at home, with the consideration due to a young gentleman. I would myself revolt at seeing one of your years and standing treated as you request me to treat you. I cannot do it. You must go home."

"Oh, no! no! Do not send me home! Do anything else. I will submit to any punishment you please. Flog me; please, flog me!"

"Flog you! Never! I have no scruples, as you know, on the subject of corporal punishment, for I often chastise the smaller boys; but boys as old and mature as you are have sense enough to be governed by other considerations than fear, and especially fear of the rod. If they have not, I want nothing to do with them."

"Oh! Mr. H., won't you please to flog me?"

And the boy actually went down on his knees and begged me to thrash him. He, Charlie Graham, whose veins ran fire, who, six hours before, would have leaped at my throat had I so much as raised my finger at him, was now begging me, as a special boon, to give him a whipping! I could hardly believe my senses. Yet there was no doubt of the boy's sincerity, or of his earnestness. So, to give me time to reflect as to what should be done, I finally said, "Charlie, I will think of what you have asked, and let you know at three o'clock."

Three o'clock came, and Charlie again made his appearance.

"Do you still wish me to whip you?"

"I do. I will make any apology you think proper to the teacher whom I insulted, and I will be most thankful to you to chastise me for the offence."

"Please to take off your coat."

When the painful affair was over, I gave him my hand cordially and frankly, and said, "Charlie, you have honorably and courageously atoned for a grievous fault, and I assure you, I restore you not only to your position in school, but to my respect and confidence."

I never had any further difficulty with Charlie Graham. Years afterwards, when I met his father at the Springs, he could hardly contain his amazement when I told him that I had once flogged his oldest son Charlie, at his own particular request. It was, I suppose, the first and last time the hand of correction was ever laid on him.

XXIII.
PHRENOLOGY.

In the previous chapter I gave a leaf from my experience of life in a boarding-school. I propose now to give another leaf from the same book. The incident about to be narrated, however, is not given as an illustration of boarding-school life, but merely because it happened at school. It might have happened elsewhere, though the circumstances on that occasion were particularly favorable for giving to it a curious point.

While I was at the head of the Edgehill school, at Princeton, N. J., a stranger called one day and announced himself as Prof. ——. The name is one almost as well known in the history of Phrenological science as that of Prof. Combe. He said he was about to give a lecture in Princeton on the subject of Phrenology, and as he was an entire stranger to myself and to all the pupils and teachers in the school, he thought it would be a good opportunity for making an interesting and critical experiment. He proposed, therefore, with my consent, to spend an hour, in presence of the school, in examining the heads of any of the boys that I might call up for that purpose. From the very intimate relations existing in a boarding-school, the characters of the boys would be well known to me and to their companions and teachers, and we would have therefore the means of knowing how far he succeeded in his experiment.

Thinking that an hour spent in this way would not be misspent, that it would at least give some variety to the monotonous routine of study and lessons, and, let me add, being not entirely without curiosity as to the result, I consented to his proposition, and called the school together in the large assembly-room. All the boys being in their seats, together with the teachers and the ladies of the household, I stated briefly the object of their assembling and the method in which it was proposed to proceed with the experiment. They were to observe entire silence, and to give no indication, by word or look, so far as they could help it, to show whether the Professor was hitting the mark or not, as he read off to them the characters of their companions. The boys took to the idea at once, and the excitement very soon was at fever-heat.

Placing a chair upon the platform, in full view of the school, and the Professor alongside of it, I called up

Boy No. 1.—This happened to be a lad about fourteen, from the interior of Alabama. He was the most athletic boy in school. "Full big he was of brawn and eke of bones," as Chaucer says, in his picture of the Miller. He could beat any boy in school in wrestling, and no doubt could flog any of them in a fist-fight, though on this point I speak only from conjecture, as this part of boys' amusements is not always as well known to their teachers as it is to the boys themselves. The Professor, after some little manipulation of the cranium, read off the boy's character with tolerable accuracy. Any one, however, with a grain of observation, who had seen the boy stalking up to the platform, with bold, almost defiant air, or had noticed his bull-neck, hard fist, and swaggering gait, could not have had much difficulty in guessing what kind of a boy he was, without resort to his bumps for information. It was written in unmistakable characters all over his physical conformation, from his head to his heels.

I noticed, however, that while the Professor's fingers were busy with the boy's cranium, his eyes were not less busy with the faces of his youthful auditors. Whenever his interpretation of any bump was a palpable hit, his success could be all too plainly read in the upturned faces before him. If the success was very marked and decisive, the youngsters were entirely unable to restrain their expressions of surprise and admiration. It was very evident, from his method of procedure, that he was guided by these expressions, quite as much as by his fingering of the bumps. He would first mention lightly some trait of character. If it attracted no particular attention, he would quietly fall on to something else. But if the announcement seemed to create a little breeze, showing that he had made a hit, he would then dwell upon the point, and intensify his expressions, until, in some instances, the school was in quite an uproar of satisfaction.

Possibly there was a spice of malice in what followed. At all events, it seemed to me that that was a kind of game at which two could play, and if, under the circumstances, he chose to palm off for knowledge gained by the fingers, what he was really getting by means of his eyes and ears, there would be no great crime in punishing him a little for his impertinence. So, in calling the following boys, I selected some who were notorious in school for certain marked traits, but whose general appearance and manner gave no indication of their mental peculiarities; and I questioned the Professor, in regard to each boy, after a method suited to the case.

Boy No. 2 was a youth of moderate abilities, and was, in all things, save one, just like other boys. But, in one matter, he had a peculiarity about which there could be no mistake. That was in the matter of music. So, after questioning the Professor about various indifferent points, moral and intellectual, such as reverence, combativeness, secretiveness, language, ideality, etc., I asked incidentally something also about tune and music. The answer was such as might be safely given in regard to ninety-nine out of every hundred persons—some vague, indefinite epithet that would apply to almost any one. But, seeing a little sparkle in the eyes before him, the gentleman manipulated the cranium again, and then expressed himself somewhat more strongly. As his expressions increased in strength, the excitement of the audience increased, until he was quite lost in hyperbole, as they were in uproar. He even went into particulars. "Now," said he, "though I never saw this boy before, yet I venture to say that his ear for music is so quick that he can pick up almost any tune by once hearing it played or whistled in the street. [A general rustle through the school, boys winking and giving knowing looks one to another.] I dare say he could now sing or whistle a hundred tunes from memory. [More knowing looks.] Possibly he may never make a very accurate performer, on account of the very ease with which he picks up a tune. He learns a tune so easily by the ear, that he will not submit to the drudgery of studying it scientifically."

"You think, then, Professor, that the boy has decided indications of musical talent?"

"Undoubtedly. He has musical talents of a very high order [suppressed shouts] amounting almost to genius!"

The fact was, poor Charlie was the butt of the whole school, on account of his utter inability to learn the first elements of either the art or the science of music. He could neither sing, whistle, nor play. He could hardly tell "Old Hundred" from "Yankee Doodle." Although he had been taking music-lessons for two years, he could not rise and fall through the eight notes, to save his neck. His attempts to do so were a sort of indiscriminate goo, goo, goo, like that of an infant; and the excitement among the boys, which the Professor had mistaken for applause and admiration, grew out of their astonishment. They were simply laughing at him.

Boy No. 3 was a youth over fourteen years old, regularly and symmetrically formed in face, features, and person. There was nothing in his make or bearing to indicate any marked peculiarity. Yet he had a peculiarity as marked as that of the preceding. He was singularly deficient in the capacity for mathematical studies. He was studying English grammar, geography, and Latin, and got along in these branches about as well as the majority of his class. But when it came to the science of numbers, he seemed to stick fast. Neither I nor any of my teachers had been able to get him beyond Long Division. It was as clear a case as I have ever known of natural deficiency in that department of the mental constitution. Yet this boy was declared by the manipulator to have a decided talent for mathematics.

Boy No. 4 was my crack mathematician. He was really in mathematics what our manipulator had made out No. 2 to be in music. His quickness in the perception of mathematical truth was wonderful. Besides this natural readiness in everything pertaining to the science of quantity and the relations of numbers, he had received a good mathematical training, and he was in this department far in advance of his years. Whenever we had a public exhibition, George was our show-card. The rapidity with which he would fill the blackboard, in solving difficult problems in quadratics, was almost bewildering. It was not every teacher even that could follow him in his quick but exact evolutions of complex algebraical formulæ. In Greek and Latin he hardly attained to mediocrity, being always behind his class, while in mathematics he was superior, not only to every boy in school, but to any boy of the same age that I have ever had in any school. But this boy received from the Professor only a second or third-rate rank for mathematical indications, while highly praised for linguistics, in which he was decidedly inferior.

The fact was, I saw that the gentleman was trying to read me, as well as the more youthful part of his audience; and so, in questioning him about this boy, I was malicious enough to be very minute and specific in my inquiries about any indications of a talent for language, while the questions about mathematics were propounded just like those about half a dozen other points; that is, with no special stress or emphasis, but just enough to draw from the Professor a clear and distinct expression of opinion.

Boy No. 5 was perhaps the most critical case of all, yet the one most difficult to describe. He was good, and about equally good, in all his studies. He stood head in almost every class. He was so uniformly good that his character became monotonous, and would have been insipid, but for the manly vigor that marked all his performances. His moral were like his mental traits. He was indeed our model boy. In two years he had not had one demerit mark. He was on all sides rounded and complete—totus teres atque rotundus. The uniformity of his goodness was sometimes a source of anxiety to me. There was danger of his growing up with a self-satisfied, pharisaical spirit.

Thus far, however, I have not named the feature which I regarded as the critical one, and which had led me to select him as one of the subjects for examination. Model boys are to be found in all schools. But this boy had a power of reticence which was to me a continual study, and it was this feature in his character that I wanted to bring out in the examination. He was not a sneak. There was nothing sly about him. His conduct was open and aboveboard. What he did was patent to all. But what he thought, or how he felt, no one knew. Not Grant himself could more perfectly keep his own counsel. If a new rule was promulgated, Joseph obeyed it to the letter. But whether it was agreeable or disagreeable to him, no teacher could ever find out. Nor was his obedience of that tame, passive sort which comes from indifference and lack of spirit. We all knew him to be resolute, and to be possessed of strong passions. But his power of self-restraint was equal to his power of reticence. He had, indeed, in a very marked degree, qualities which you look for only in those who have had a long schooling in the stern realities of life, and which you find rarely even then. He was as self-poised as a man of fifty, with not a particle of that easy impulsiveness so nearly universal at his age.

None of the gentleman's performances surprised me so much as the character which he assigned to this boy, and all the more because something of the boy's self-continence and reserve was written upon his face and manner. He was represented by the Professor, in general terms, as having a free and easy, rollicking sort of disposition—not being really worse than his companions, though probably having the reputation of being so. 'If he got into more scrapes than the others [Joseph was never in a scrape in his life], it was more owing to his natural impulsiveness than to anything inherently bad in him. And then, when he did get into a scrape, he had no faculty for concealing it. His organ of secretiveness was unusually small. The boys would hardly admit him to a partnership in their plans of mischief, so sure was he inadvertently to let the cat out of the bag,' etc., etc.

Boy No. 6 was the weakest boy, mentally, that we had in school. He was barely able to take care of himself. Some of his mistakes and blunders were so ridiculous, that they were handed down among the traditionary jokes of the school, and I am afraid even at this day to repeat them, lest they may be recognized. If the manipulator had had the cranium of Daniel Webster under his fingers, he could not have drawn a mental character more marked by every trait that belongs to intellectual greatness of the highest order. Finding that he was making a decided impression upon his young hearers, the Professor continued to pile up qualities and powers, until the scene became almost too much for the most practised gravity.

The examinations occupied an hour, and I made copious notes of the whole, writing down, as nearly as I could, the exact expressions used by the operator. The report which I have now given of it is as nearly literal as it is safe to make it.

When the Professor was through, and was about to leave, he asked me privately to tell him how far he had succeeded in his experiments. Not wishing to say anything disagreeable, I evaded the question to the best of my ability, answering with some vague generalities, but indicating sufficiently that it was not agreeable to be more explicit. He pressed me, however, to tell him candidly and explicitly whether he had succeeded, and how far. I then told him frankly that he had failed point-blank in every case. "Ah," said he, "you are skeptical." "No, sir," said I, "skepticism implies doubt, and I have no longer any doubts on the subject. My skepticism is entirely removed!"

XXIV.
NORMAL SCHOOLS.

The term Normal School is an unfortunate misnomer, and its general adoption has led to much confusion of ideas. The word "Normal," from the Latin norma, a rule or pattern to work by, does not differ essentially from "Model." A Normal School, according to the meaning of the word, would be a pattern school, an institution which could be held up for imitation, to be copied by other schools of the same grade. But this meaning of the word is not what we mean by the thing. When we mean a school to be copied or imitated, we call it a Model School. Here the name and the thing agree. The name explains the thing. It is very different when we speak of a Normal School. To the uninitiated, the term either conveys no meaning at all; or, if your hearer is a man of letters, it conveys to him an idea which you have at once to explain away. You have to tell him, in effect, that a Normal School is not a Normal School, and then that it is something else, which the word does not in the least describe.

What then do we mean by a Normal School? What is the thing which we have called by this unfortunate name?

A Normal School is a seminary for the professional education of teachers. It is an institution in which those who wish to become teachers learn how to do their work; in which they learn, not reading, but how to teach reading; not penmanship, but how to teach penmanship; not grammar, but how to teach grammar; not geography, but how to teach geography; not arithmetic, but how to teach arithmetic. The idea which lies at the basis of such an institute, is that knowing a thing, and knowing how to teach that thing to others, are distinguishable and very different facts. The knowledge of the subjects to be taught, may be gained at any school. In order to give to the Teachers' Seminary its full power and efficiency, it were greatly to be desired that the subjects themselves, as mere matters of knowledge, should be first learned elsewhere, before entering the Teachers' School. This latter would then have to do only with its own special function, that of showing its matriculants how to use these materials in the process of teaching. Unfortunately, we have not yet made such progress in popular education as to be able to separate these two functions to the extent that is desirable. Many of those who attend a Teachers' Seminary, come to it lamentably ignorant of the common branches of knowledge. They have consequently first to study these branches in the Normal School, as they would study them in any other school. That is, they have first to learn the facts as matters of knowledge, and then to study the art and science of teaching these facts to others. Instead of coming with their brick and mortar ready prepared, that they may be instructed in the use of the trowel and the plumb-line, they have to make their brick and mix their mortar after they enter the institution. This is undoubtedly a drawback and a misfortune. But it cannot be helped at present. All we can do is to define clearly the true idea of the Teachers' School, and then to work towards it as fast and as far as we can.

A Normal School is essentially unlike any other school. It has been compared indeed to those professional schools which are for the study of law, divinity, medicine, mining, engineering, and so forth. The Normal School, it is true, is like these schools in one respect. It is established with reference to the wants of a particular profession. It is a professional school. But those schools have for their main object the communication of some particular branch of science. They teach law, divinity, medicine, mining, or engineering. They aim to make lawyers, divines, physicians, miners, engineers, not teachers of these branches. The Professor in the Law School aims, not to make Professors of law, but lawyers. The medical Professor aims, not to make medical lecturers, but practitioners. To render these institutions analogous to the Teachers' Seminary, their pupils should first study law, medicine, engineering, and so forth, and then sit at the feet of their Gamaliels to be initiated into the secrets of the Professorial chair, that they may in turn become Professors of those branches to classes of their own. Nor would such a plan, if it were possible, be altogether without its value. It surely needs no demonstration to prove, that in the highest departments, no less than in the lowest, something more than knowledge is needed in order to teach. An understanding of how to communicate one's knowledge, and practical skill in doing it, are as necessary in teaching theology, metaphysics, languages, infinitesimal analysis, or chemistry, as they are in teaching the alphabet. If there are bunglers, who know not how to go to work to teach a child its letters, or to open its young mind and heart to the reception of truth, whose school-rooms are places where the young mind and heart are in a state, either of perpetual torpor, or of perpetual nightmare, have these bunglers no analogues in the men of ponderous erudition that sometimes fill the Professor's chair? Have we no examples, in our highest seminaries of learning, of men very eminent in scientific attainments, who have not in themselves the first elements of a teacher? who impart to their students no quickening impulse? whose vast and towering knowledge may make them perhaps a grand feature in their College, attracting to it all eyes, but whose intellectual treasures, for all the practical wants of the students, are of no more use, than are the swathed and buried mummies in the pyramid of Cheops!

A Teachers' Seminary, if it were complete, would include in its curriculum of study the entire cycle of human knowledge, so far as it is taught by schools. Our teachers of mathematics and of logic, of law and of medicine, need indeed a knowledge of the branches which they are to teach, and for this knowledge they do not need a Teachers' Seminary. But they need something more than this knowledge. Besides being men of erudition, they need to be teachers, no less than the humbler members of the profession, who have only to teach the alphabet and the multiplication table; and there is in all teaching, high or low, something that is common to them all—an art and a skill which is different from the mere knowledge of the subjects; which is not necessarily learned in learning the subjects; which requires special, superadded gifts, and distinct study and training. There is, according to my observation, as great a lack of this special skill in the higher seminaries of learning, as in the lower seminaries. Were it possible to have a Normal School, not which should undertake to teach the entire encyclopædia of the sciences, but which, limiting itself to its one main function of developing the art and mystery of communicating knowledge, should turn out College Professors, and even Divinity, Law, and Medical Professors,—men who were really skilful teachers,—it would work a change in those venerable institutions as marked and decisive as that which it is now effecting in the common schools. Of course, no such scheme is possible; certainly, none such is contemplated. But I am very sure I shall not be considered calumnious, when I express the conviction, that there are learned and eminent occupants of Professors' chairs, who might find great benefit in an occasional visit to a good Normal School, or even to the class-room of a teacher trained in a Normal School. I certainly have seen, in the very lowest department of the common school, a style of teaching, which, for a wise and intelligent comprehension of its object, and for its quickening power upon the intellect and conscience, would compare favorably with the very best teaching I have ever seen in a College or University.

I come back, then, to the point from which I set out, namely, that a Normal School, or Teachers' Seminary, differs essentially from every other kind of school. It aims to give the knowledge and skill that are needed alike in all schools. To make the point a little plainer, let me restate, with what clearness I can, some of the elementary truths and facts which lie at the foundation of the whole subject. Though to many of my readers it may be going over a beaten track, it may not be so to all; and we all do well, even in regard to known and admitted truths, to bring them occasionally afresh to the mind.

As it has been already said, a man may know a thing perfectly, and yet not be able to teach it. Of course, a man cannot teach what he does not know. He must first have the knowledge. But the mere possession of knowledge does not make one a teacher, any more than the possession of powder and shot makes him a marksman, or the possession of a rod and line makes him an angler. The most learned men are often unfortunately the very men who have least capacity for communicating what they know. Nor is this incapacity confined to those versed in book knowledge. It is common to every class of men, and to every kind of knowledge. Let me give an example. The fact about to be stated, was communicated to me by a gentleman of eminent commercial standing in Philadelphia, at that time the President of one of its leading banks. The fact occurred in his own personal experience. He was, at the time of its occurrence, largely engaged in the cloth trade. His faculties of mind and body, and particularly his sense of touch, had been so trained in this business, that in going rapidly over an invoice of cloth, as his eye and hand passed in quick succession from piece to piece, in the most miscellaneous assortment, he could tell instantly the value of each, with a degree of precision, and a certainty of knowledge, hardly credible. A single glance of the eye, a single touch, transient as thought, gave the result. His own knowledge of the subject, in short, was perfect, and it was rapidly winning him a fortune. Yet when undertaking to explain to a younger and less experienced member of the craft, whom he wished to befriend, by what process he arrived at his judgment, in other words, to teach what he knew, he found himself utterly at a loss. His thoughts had never run in that direction. "Oh!" said he, "you have only—to look at the cloth, and—and—to run your fingers over it,—thus. You will perceive at once the difference between one piece and another." It seems never to have occurred to him that another man's sensations and perceptions might in the same circumstances be quite different from his, and that in order to communicate his knowledge to one uninitiated, he must pause to analyze it; he must separate, classify, and name those several qualities of the cloth of which his senses took cognizance; he must then ascertain how far his interrogator perceived by his senses the same qualities which he himself did, and thus gradually get on common ground with him.

Let the receiving-teller of a bank be called upon to explain how it is that he knows at a glance a counterfeit bill from a genuine one, and in nine cases out of ten he will succeed no better than the cloth merchant did. Knowing and communicating what we know, doing and explaining what we do, are distinct, separable, and usually very different processes.

Similar illustrations might be drawn from artists, and from men of original genius in almost every profession, who can seldom give any intelligible account of how they achieve their results. The mental habits best suited for achievement are rarely those best suited for teaching. Marlborough, so celebrated for his military combinations, could never give any intelligible account of his plans. He had arrived at his conclusions with unerring certainty, but he was so little accustomed to observing his own mental processes, that he utterly failed in attempting to make them plain to others. He saw the points himself with perfect clearness, but he had no power to make others see them. To all objections to his plans, he could only say, "Silly, silly, that's silly." It was much the same with Cromwell. It is so with most men who are distinguished for action and achievement. Patrick Henry would doubtless have made but a third-rate teacher of elocution, and old Homer but an indifferent lecturer on the art of poetry.

To acquire knowledge ourselves, then, and to put others in possession of what we have acquired, are not only distinct intellectual processes, but they are quite unlike. In the former case, the faculties merely go out towards the objects to be known, as in the case of the cloth merchant passing his eye and finger over the bales of cloth. But in the case of one attempting to teach, several additional processes are needed, besides that of collecting knowledge. He must turn his thoughts inward, so as to arrange and classify properly the contents of his intellectual storehouse. He must then examine his own mind, his intellectual machinery, so as to understand exactly how the knowledge came in upon himself. He must lastly study the minds of his pupils, so as to know through what channels the knowledge may best reach them. The teacher may not always be aware that he does all these things, that is, he may not always have a theory of his own art. But the art itself he must have. He must first get the knowledge of the things to be taught; he must secondly study his knowledge; he must thirdly study himself; he must lastly study his pupil. He is a teacher at all only so far as he does at least these four things.

In a Normal School, as before said, the knowledge of the subject is presupposed. The object of the Normal School is, not so much to make arithmeticians and grammarians, for instance, as to make teachers of arithmetic and grammar. This teaching faculty is a thing by itself, and quite apart from the subject matter to be taught. It underlies every branch of knowledge, and every trade and profession. The theologian, the mathematician, the linguist, the learned professor, no less than the teacher of the primary school, or of the Sabbath-school, all need this supplementary knowledge and skill, in which consists the very essence of teaching. This knowledge of how to teach is not acquired by merely studying the subject to be taught. It is a study by itself. A man may read familiarly the Mechanique Celeste, and yet not know how to teach the multiplication table. He may read Arabic or Sanskrit, and not know how to teach a child the alphabet of his mother tongue. The Sabbath-school teacher may dip deep into biblical lore, he may ransack the commentaries, and may become, as many Sabbath-school teachers are, truly learned in Bible knowledge, and yet be utterly incompetent to teach a class of children. He can no more hit the wandering attention, or make a lodgment of his knowledge in the minds of his youthful auditory, than the mere unskilled possessor of a fowling-piece can hit a bird upon the wing.

The art of teaching is the one indispensable qualification of the teacher. Without this, whatever else he may be, he is no teacher. How may this art be acquired? In the first place, many persons pick it up, just as they pick up a great many other arts and trades,—in a hap-hazard sort of way. They have some natural aptitude for it, and they grope their way along, by guess and by instinct, and through many failures, until they become good teachers, they hardly know how. To rescue the art from this condition of uncertainty and chance, is the object of the Normal School. In such a school, the main object of the pupil is to learn how to make others know what he himself knows. The whole current of his thoughts and studies is turned into this channel. Studying how to teach, with an experimental class to practise on, forms the constant topic of his meditations. It is surprising how rapidly, under such conditions, the faculty of teaching is developed; how fertile the mind becomes in devising practical expedients, when once the attention is roused and fixed upon the precise object to be attained, and the idea of what teaching really is, fairly has possession of the mind. For this purpose every well-ordered Normal School has, in connection with it, as a part of its organization, a Model School, to serve the double purpose of a school of observation and practice.

Thus, after these pupil-teachers are once familiar with the branches to be taught, and after they have become acquainted with the theory of teaching, as a science, it is surprising how soon, with even a little of this practice-teaching, they acquire the art. If the faculty of teaching is in them at all, a very few experimental lessons, under the eye of an experienced teacher, will develop it.

The fact of possessing within one's self this gift, or power of teaching, sometimes breaks upon the possessor himself with all the force of a surprising and most delightful discovery. The good teacher does not indeed stop here. He goes on to improve in his art, as long as he lives. But his greatest single achievement is when he takes the first step,—when he first learns to teach at all. The pupil of a Normal School gains there a start and an impulse, which carry him forward the rest of his life. A very little judicious experimental training redeems hundreds of candidates from utter and hopeless incompetency, and converts for them an awkward and painful drudgery into keen, hopeful and productive labor.

XXV.
PRACTICE-TEACHING.

One feature of a Normal School which distinguishes it especially from other schools, is the opportunity given to its matriculants for practising their art under the guidance and criticism of an experienced teacher. This practice-teaching is done in a Model School, maintained for this purpose in connection with the main school. Such is the theory.

But serious difficulties are encountered in carrying the plan into practical effect, and these difficulties are so great as in some instances to have led to the entire abandonment of the plan, while very rarely have the conductors of Normal schools been able to realize results in this matter commensurate with their wishes or with their views of what was desirable and right.

Some of the difficulties are the following: Parents who send their children to the Model School object to have their children taught to any considerable extent by mere pupil-teachers. The teachers of the Model School, having little or no acquaintance with the Normal pupils sent to teach under their supervision, do not feel that entire freedom in criticising the performance which is essential to its success. The irregularities produced by these practice-teachings have a tendency to impair the discipline of the classes in the Model School.

For these and other reasons which I need not dwell upon, I at least have always been obliged to be somewhat chary in regard to the amount of practice-teaching that was done in the institution under my care, and have never felt quite satisfied as to the result. At the beginning of the year 1867, I determined to try the plan of having a considerable portion of the practice-teaching done in the Normal School itself, the Model School still holding its place in the system as furnishing an unrivalled opportunity for observation, and to some extent of practice also. The effect of thus extending the opportunity for practice by including the Normal School in its operations has been most happy. The pupils have attained a degree of freedom in the exercise which is working the most marked and decisive results. They enter into it with more zest than into any other exercise of the class, and derive from it in some instances as much benefit as from all their other exercises put together.

Some detailed account of the method may perhaps be of interest to other laborers in the same field. The method is substantially the same as that followed in the Girls High and Normal School of Philadelphia, from which indeed I borrowed the idea.

Once a week I make up a programme containing the names of those who are to teach during the following week, and the classes and lessons which they are severally to teach. The practice-pupils are thus enabled to prepare themselves fully for the exercise. It is an indispensable condition in all these exercises that the lesson be given without the use of the book. When a pupil enters a room to teach one of these assigned lessons, he is to bring with him only his crayon and pointer, and is expected to assume entire charge of the class, maintaining order, hearing the pupils recite, correcting their mistakes, illustrating the subject, if necessary, by diagrams or experiments, giving supplementary information drawn from other sources than the text-book, and acting in all respects as if he were the regular teacher. The regular teacher meanwhile sits by, observing in silence, and at the close of the day writes out a full and detailed criticism upon the performance in a book kept for this purpose, and gives the pupil an average for it, the maximum being 100. These criticisms, together with the teaching averages, are read next day by the Principal to the pupil in the presence of the class to which he belongs, with additional comments in regard to any principles of teaching that may be involved in the criticisms.

An essential element of success in this scheme, is that the teachers should be thoroughly faithful in the work of criticism, and point out the errors and shortcomings of the young practitioners, not with harshness, but with unsparing truthfulness and wise discrimination. Practice-teaching under such conditions cannot fail to have a powerful effect. The pupils are stimulated by it to put forth the very best efforts of which they are capable, and the talent which they often develop is a surprise equally to themselves and their teachers.

I cannot better give an idea of this practice-teaching, and especially of the criticism which is its vitalizing principle, than by quoting a few of the actual criticisms made during the last year. I feel sure they will interest teachers and perhaps the public.

In making these extracts, I suppress, of course, the names of the parties.

1868.

PHILADELPHIA:ELDREDGE & BROTHER,17 and 19 South Sixth Street.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by ELDREDGE & BROTHER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

J. FAGAN & SONSTEREOTYPE FOUNDERS,PHILADELPHIA.

PRINTED BY SHERMAN & CO.

TO THETeachers of the United States,AND ESPECIALLY TO THE ALUMNI OF THE PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL, AND OF THENew Jersey State Normal SchoolTHE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS ARE MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

CONTENTS.

IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM.

I.WHAT IS TEACHING?

II.THE ART OF QUESTIONING.

III.THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TEACHING AND TRAINING.

IV.MODES OF HEARING RECITATIONS.

V.ON OBSERVING A PROPER ORDER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES.

VI.TEACHING CHILDREN WHAT THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

VII.CULTIVATING THE MEMORY IN YOUTH.

VIII.KNOWLEDGE BEFORE MEMORY.

IX.THE POWER OF WORDS.

X.THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

XI.CULTIVATING THE VOICE.

XII.EYES.

XIII.ERRORS OF THE CAVE.

XIV.MEN OF ONE IDEA.

XV.A TALENT FOR TEACHING.

XVI.TEACHING POWER.

XVII.GROWING.

XVIII.LOVING THE CHILDREN.

XIX.GAINING THE AFFECTIONS OF THE SCHOLARS.

XX.THE OBEDIENCE OF CHILDREN.

XXI.RAREY AS AN EDUCATOR.

XXII.A BOARDING-SCHOOL EXPERIENCE.

XXIII.PHRENOLOGY.

XXIV.NORMAL SCHOOLS.

XXV.PRACTICE-TEACHING.