EDUCATION AT HOME.
Education at Home has been thus aptly illustrated: History and Geography should begin at home. If we want a boy to know some day the families of the Herods and the Cæsars, let him start by learning who was his own grandfather. The Church Catechism rightly commences by making the child tell his own name; it would be in many cases almost puzzling, but in all cases and senses a most proper question, to ask him, further, the names of his godfathers and godmothers; and so carrying him gradually onward, he would know, what seldom happens, the kings of England before he attempts those of Israel and Judah. This principle holds as true of places as of persons. The things that touch us nearest interest us most. Geography should begin from the school-walls: “Which side of this room does the sun rise on?” “Does Church-lane run west or north?” “Whither does the brook flow that rises on Squash-hill?” In this way the young scholar would in time be brought to comprehend the round world and his own position on it, and probably with some clearer perception of the truth and relation of things than if he had begun by rote: “The earth is a terraqueous globe, depressed at the poles, consisting of,” &c. But we are all taught on the contrary plan. We begin at the wrong end; for, in the ladder of learning, Ego, not Adam, is the true No. 1. We start from the equator instead of High-street, and the result is the lamentable fact, that even educated men are strangers in their own country, and thousands die within the sound of Bow-bells who have never seen the inside of St. Paul’s. Topography, then, should precede geography. Yet perhaps there is not a schoolroom in England where a county map is to be found hung up on the wall. Frightened by the remembrance of having been once the deluded subscriber to a Topographical Dictionary, even students have a horror of the word; and the subject is consigned, in expensive folios, to a few professed antiquaries, or to some eccentric member of a county family, who emerges every third or fourth generation to preserve a provincial dignity which he would not willingly let die.[[70]]
[70]. Quarterly Review.