In pedagogy we are teaching more and more by the natural method—learning by doing—and less and less by means of injunction and precept.
In penology we seek to educate and reform, not to suppress, repress and punish.
That is to say, the gods are on high Olympus—let them stay there.
Athens is here.
The Grammarian
The best way to learn to write is to write.
Herbert Spencer never studied grammar until he had learned to write. He took his grammar at sixty, which is a good age for one to begin this most interesting study, as by the time you have reached that age you have largely lost your capacity to sin.
Men who can swim exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of swimming at natatoriums, from professors of the amphibian art—they were just boys who jumped into the ol' swimmin' hole, and came home with shirts on wrong-side out and a tell-tale dampness in their hair.
Correspondence schools for the taming of bronchos are as naught; and treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of no avail—follow nature's lead.
Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of the science of pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or the proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all.
"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age.