Mr. Bently at last gives his consent, and Joe enlists as an apprentice in the Navy. The story of his journey, his examination, his experiences, on board ship and his adventures while lying in foreign ports is very graphically told, and the boy who reads it gets a clear and actual idea of what a boy must go through on board a man-of-war before he can graduate as an "able-bodied seaman." The writer shows a thorough acquaintance with every thing on board ship, even to the minutest details. The book ends with the promotion of Joe, and a promise to continue his adventures in another volume.
The Evolution of Dodd. By W.H. Smith. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00. Here is a book we should rejoice to see in the hands of every teacher of youth in the country. It is a living, breathing protest against certain features of the present school systems which obtain in various parts of the country, from that of the kindergarten to the grammar school. The points of the author are so well taken, that the reader is forced not only to admit the reality of the evils he denounces, but to acknowledge the justice of the conclusions at which he arrives.
In the evolution of character the public school has come to be a most important factor. To it has been assigned a task equal to any other agency that deals with human nature. But in multitudes of cases it has become a mere mill for grinding out graduates. The "system" has largely lost sight of the grandest thing in all the world—the individual soul. It addresses itself to child-humanity collectively, as if characters were manufactured, like pins, by the million, and all alike, and it attempts to grind out this great mass, each individual like every other, as if its members could be made interchangeable like the parts of a government musket.
To illustrate his ideas, the author selects a representative boy, Dodd Weaver, the eldest son of a Methodist clergyman, and carries him through the various schools and grades of schools from the time of his entrance to his graduation. He does not make him a model boy to begin with, and strive to show how he was spoiled by the school system. On the contrary he endows him with a good many disagreeable qualities; he makes him bright, sharp, and full of vitality, with a strong bent for mischief. He is high-tempered, quarrelsome, and disobedient, and yet in the hands of one who understands his mental peculiarities plastic as dough. It is the aim of the author to show how utterly useless it is to treat such boys—and our schools are full of them—in exactly the same manner as those of different character and temperament, and to demand that teachers have the right to adapt their methods according to individual demands. He says:
It is not a system—any set of rules or formularies—that can make our school, any more than it is forms and ceremonies that make our churches. These may all be well enough in their proper places, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in them, per se. It is the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees in the one case, and the dry bones of pedagogy in the other.
The evil arises, in the schools as in the churches, from believing and acting as if there were something in the system itself.
If human nature were a fixed quantity, if any two children were alike, or anywhere nearly alike, if a certain act done for a child always brought forth the same result, then it might be possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry. But the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any other of Nature's laboratories.
A chemist will distil for you the odor of a blown rose, or catch and hold captive the breath of the morning meadow, and do it always just the same, and ever with like results; but there is no art by which anything analogous can be wrought in human life. Here a new element comes in that entirely changes that economy of Nature in this regard. The individuality of every human soul is this new factor, and because of it, of its infinite variability—because no two atoms that are cast into the crucible of life are ever the same, or can be wrought into character by the same means—because of this, no fixed rules can ever be laid down for evolving a definite result, in the realm of soul, by never-varying means.
And this is where many teachers are at fault. They put their faith in a system, a mill through which all children shall be run, and in passing through which each child shall receive the same treatment, and from which they shall all emerge, stamped with the seal of the institution, "uniformity."