The logician will teach us what must be done in order to cultivate the intelligence of the young.
The educator will ever be inspired by this grand truth: “Man acts as he loves, and he loves as he thinks.” He will try to grave in the souls of children all the beautiful and grand truths which can awaken and nourish pure and noble affections.
Finally, the man of letters has also his part in the course in language, in the sense that pupils, besides being required from the beginning of their studies to invent propositions and sentences, will have a little later to compose narratives, letters, dialogues, etc.
554. The Grammar of Ideas.—Elementary instruction should have for its purpose the development of the mind and the judgment. It is no longer a question of cultivating the memory alone and of causing words to be learned. The Père Girard would have grammar made an exercise in thinking.
“The grammars in use,” he says, “are intended simply to teach correctness in speaking and writing. By their aid we are able finally to avoid a certain number of faults in style and orthography.... This instruction becomes a pure affair of memory, and the child becomes accustomed to pronounce sounds to which he attaches no meaning. The child needs a grammar of ideas.... Our grammars of words are the plague of education.”
In other terms, grammar should be made above all else an exercise in thinking, and, as it were, “the logic of childhood.”
555. Discreet Use of Rules.—The Père Girard does not proscribe rules. The teaching of language cannot do without them; “but there is,” he says, “a proper manner of presenting them to children, and a just medium to hold.”
In the teaching of grammar we must follow the course which the grammarians themselves have followed in order to construct their science: “The rules were established on facts. It is then to facts that they must be referred in instruction, in order that by this means children may be taught to do intelligently what they have hitherto done through blind imitation.... Few rules, many exercises. Rules are always abstract, dry, and for this very reason poorly adapted to please children, even when they can comprehend them. We ought, then, in general, to make a very sparing use of them.”
So the Père Girard particularly recommends practical exercises, oral instruction, the continual use of the blackboard, the active and animated co-operation of all the members of the class, rapid interrogation, the Socratic method, the abuse of which, however, he criticises.[230]
556. Moral Arithmetic.[231]—The Père Girard, like almost all the men who have conceived an original idea, has fallen into the love of systematizing. He believed that not only language, but all the branches of study might contribute to moral education.