"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

the same children’s text-books more rapidly than the best children in the public schools of the North are allowed to learn.

Sir John Lubbock complains that “A thousand hours in the most precious seed-time of life of millions of children spent in learning that i must follow e in conceive, and precede it in believe; that two e’s must, no one knows why, come together in proceed and exceed, and be separated in precede and accede; that uncle must be spelled with a c, but ankle with a k,—while lessons in health and thrift, sewing and cooking, which should make the life of the poor tolerable, and elementary singing and drawing which should make it pleasant, and push out lower and degrading amusements, are in many cases almost vainly trying to gain admission.”

Take the course all through, and what is there about it that should require any great consumption of time? Reading certainly is not hard to acquire. Children out of school learn it in spite of any efforts to hold them back. Spelling is learned more effectually through reading than from any text-book. Writing requires only a model of which copies may be made, for there is no business man in New York or in any other large city who writes a copy-book hand. If he did, he would be considered incompetent for whatever position he may occupy. The first thing that a boy must learn on leaving school is to unlearn his writing-lessons. Arithmetic undoubtedly requires considerable practice to make the pupil perfect and quick in computations, but as it consists entirely of applications of the first four rules, why is it that so much time is spent over the text-books and very abstract propositions and problems? Text-books of arithmetic seem to be skilfully designed for the purpose of keeping the child from practical knowledge on the subject as long as possible. Examples that are called practical are given in many of these books, but only after a large amount of figuring, the purpose of which the pupil is not allowed to clearly understand. A man whose education in figures has been obtained on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk will cypher more accurately and quickly any problem of ordinary nature that may be given him than his own son or daughter who has been several years in school, because he understands the relations and purposes of the factors, which never seem to be impressed upon the child.

General F. A. Walker, once superintendent of the census and now president of the Boston Institute of Technology, says: “The old-fashioned readiness and correctness of cyphering have been to a large degree sacrificed by the methods which it is now proposed to reform. A false arithmetic has grown up and has largely crowded out of place that true arithmetic, which is nothing but the art of numbers.”

Geography is so largely a matter of memory of the eye that no man who was denied the privilege of studying this science while he was at school ever thinks it necessary to spend a great amount of time over it afterward, even if his business requires him to have a practical knowledge of the subject. It is simply a question of sight and of memory, just as is the case with knowledge of localities which he may visit either to a great or small extent, yet geography in the public schools is divided into two, three, and sometimes five different books, by the use of which the pupil goes again and again over the same lessons, obtaining in the end no more information than that he would get by a few days’ deliberate study of an atlas or a set of maps.

Prof. Geikie, a recognized authority on this subject, says: “Every question of geography should be one which requires for its answer that the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and taken note of it.” This is reasonable; it would also be practicable if globes and large maps were in the class-rooms, but generally they are conspicuous only by their absence.

It is quite true that grammar must occupy considerable of the pupils’ time. For all the persons who have studied it, there seem very few of any age at the present time who are able to apply the principles of this science in such a manner that they habitually write and speak correctly. But this isn’t so much the fault of the pupil and of the teacher as of the text-books from which the science shall be studied. Good example, from which adults learn grammar more correctly and rapidly than in any other way, seems to be considered too good for children, so they are given text-books with definitions utterly beyond their comprehension—definitions so subdivided that there is nothing which the intelligent teacher so dreads as a few intelligent questions on the subject from a pupil on the grammar-lesson of the day. I have seen an intelligent man, himself a college graduate, and a public speaker of high reputation and elegant style, labor with one of his children over a lesson in grammar, and finally give up in despair and toss the book across the room. If a man of such character is unable to understand a grammatical text-book, what can be expected of the child?

The greater the scholar or teacher, the greater is his contempt for text-books of grammar. Old Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth of England, delights in saying that his distinguished pupil “never yet tooke Greek or Latin Grammer in her hande after the first declininge of a Noun and a Verb.” A more celebrated teacher, John Locke, complained that “Our children are forced to stick unreasonably in grammatical flats and shallows.” Dr. Parkhurst said recently: “The way for a boy to talk correctly is to talk subject to correction—not to apply himself to linguistic anatomy, surgery and dissection. I studied grammar in the ordinary way about three weeks—just long enough to find out what a genius some people can show for putting asunder what God hath joined together. It is a splendid device for using up a boy’s time and souring his disposition.”

Well, all this routine is being imposed upon the children, and the little wretches are losing spirit and impulse through the delay to which the cleverer ones are subjected and the lack of clearness which causes the stupider ones to despair. Nothing whatever is done toward training the senses and physical intelligence of the child. They do this sort of thing abroad, but for some reason Americans are not allowed to follow the foreigners’ example. Apparently our children have a divine call to whatever handiwork may fall to their lot thereafter in the world, for certainly they get as little training in it as the twelve apostles had in theology before they were called to preach and teach. The French or German, the Swedish child, and even many a Russian child, is taught to use his hands and his eyes and all his senses that can be applied to practical affairs, but the American child gets no opportunity of that sort, except in the few schools which conform more or less to the kindergarten system. We have a few technical schools in large cities, but they are regarded as means to finish a course of education instead of part of the ordinary elementary instruction.

When technical education, which means simply the use of the hands and eyes, is spoken of to members of Boards of Education and Superintendents of common school systems in large cities, the result is generally an impatient gesture or word. There is no room for that sort of thing, we are told; beside, it is a mere notion of theorists. The general run of children are not equal to it and would be more troubled than benefited by it.