[57] Lectures and Essays: English in School, by J. R. Seeley, p. 222. Elsewhere in the same lecture (p. 229) Professor Seeley says: “The schoolmaster might set this right. Every boy that enters the school is a talking creature. He is a performer, in his small degree, upon the same instrument as Milton and Shakespeare. Only do not sacrifice this advantage. Do not try by artificial and laborious processes to give him a new knowledge before you have developed that which he has already. Train and perfect the gift of speech, unfold all that is in it, and you train at the same time the power of thought and the power of intellectual sympathy, you enable your pupil to think the thoughts and to delight in the words of great philosophers and poets.” I wish this lecture were published separately.
[58] Rep. bk. vii, 536, ad f.; Davies and Vaughan, p. 264.
[59] In Buisson (Dictionnaire) No. 7 is “The children must have frequent play, and a break after every lesson.” Raumer connects this with No. 6, and says: “breaks were rendered necessary by Ratke’s plan, which kept the learners far too silent.”
[60] In the matter of grammar Ratke’s advice, so long disregarded, has recently been followed in the “Parallel Grammar Series,” published by Messrs. Sonnenschein.
[61] The ordinary teaching of almost every subject offers illustrations of the neglect of this principle. Take, e.g., the way in which children are usually taught to read. First, they have to say the alphabet—a very easy task as it seems to us, but if we met with a strange word of twenty-six syllables, and that not a compound word, but one of which every syllable was new to us, we might have some difficulty in remembering it. And yet such a word would be to us what the alphabet is to a child. When he can perform this feat, he is next required to learn the visual symbols of the sounds and to connect these with the vocal symbols. Some of the vocal symbols bring the child in contact with the sound itself, but most are simply conventional. What notion does the child get of the aspirate from the name of the letter h? Having learnt twenty-six visual and twenty-six vocal symbols, and connected them together, the child finally comes to the sounds (over 40 in number) which the symbols are supposed to represent.
[62] See Mr. E. E. Bowen’s vigorous essay on “Teaching by means of Grammar,” in Essays on a Liberal Education, 1867.
I have returned to the subject of language-learning in § 15 of Jacotot in the note. [See page 426.]
[63] Preface to the Prodromus.
[64] Preface to Prodromus, first edition, p. 40; second edition (1639), p. 78. The above is Hartlib’s translation, see A Reformation of Schools, &c., pp. 46, 47.
[65] Preface to Prodromus, first edition, p. 40; second edition, p. 79. A Reformation, &c., p. 47.