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every one of them somehow. Thus the demon haste--the haste and hurry of the exchange and the market-is in danger of importation into the tranquillity of childhood and what ought to be the calm ongoing of youth.

Let me take an example or two. There is a 'subject' taught in schools which is called Geography, and which, from its name, we should guess to be a connected description of the operations and appearances of Nature in terrestrial space. Now the story of the meaning and connection of the infinitely beautiful sights that lie all around us-of the life of man and animals and plants all over the globe-is a story not very difficult to tell, and that is certain to be followed with the growing interest and wonder of the children who listen. But into what has this intensely interesting narrative been turned by school traditions, and by the ever-pressing necessities of routine and drill? Into a list of dry names, a wilderness of unconnected facts, a long array of numbers, a mound of miscellaneous gossip and statistical material, which no architectonic power of the pupil can ever raise into a mental edifice. He does not make the attempt. The teacher himself does not make the attempt. He thinks he is giving 'knowledge;' and a small dose of this dead 'information' is poured into the pupil's memory twice a week. No curiosity precedes the process; no wonder accompanies it; no exercise of judgment is called for by it; no imaginative or sympathetic power is quickened by it. No power except the volitional memory is called into use; and that is the poorest and most barren side of the mind. The knowledge given if knowledge it can be called-is the same in kind and in interest with that which is obtained from the directory of a city or a county. One asks naturally, Who is it that makes such books? Are they indeed human and breathing beings? Did they sit down, of set and deliberate purpose, and say to themselves, 'Now I will tell young people what the world is, and what they ought to try and see when they open their eyes?' No; these books were not written in the sense in which a poem or a work on mathematics is written; they were produced by a kind of spontaneous degeneration; they grew as funguses grow, from the decay of that which was nobler and better than themselves. The facts came together like any other fortuitous concourse of atoms, or like the moraine-wall on a glacier, by the gradual exclusion and edging off produced by the motion of the mass of ice. Some one, in a thoughtless moment, fancied that a list of names would be at least 'convenient' both for teacher and pupil; another added to the list those names which he, in the exercise of a judgment based upon no consideration whatever, took it into his head that boys and girls 'ought to know;' while a third or a fourth thought that he could and should make a bigger book, and a more exhaustive and exhausting set of tasks, than any previous compiler; and thus this terrible infliction, this fearful mass of facts, this dreary labor, has grown to its present monstrous proportions. There are books on this subject, used both in England and Scotland, in which the pupils are required to learn by heart and to attach to a black dot upon a map about 12,000 names, not one-tenth of which is there any internal or external necessity for knowing any thing whatever about. The time and the power of the school are wasted in this dreary business, and permanent disgust or a wrong bent is given to the unfortunate pupil. Such is the result of a mindless dealing with things of the mind. This thoughtless and unnatural selection' ends, in the field of the intellect, in a sort of distorted Darwinianism; it ends in the survival of the unfittest. We send our children to rummage in this dust-heap of disconnected details, while all around them the fair world of nature lies unquestioned and unexplored. Much better that our young men should be following the plow and tilling the ground, or making sound and lasting chairs and tables, than that they should waste their time and nerves in trying to find a place for this dishonest nonsense in the memory of their pupils. Let us take another example. There is nothing so edifying and inspiring for the young as the right learning of History. They like to hear what the grown up people have done and said-what brave men have done, and what wise men have planned, and men of genius have written or sung; nor can there be the least objection to giving them a connected view of the course of events in our own history or in the history of the world. And if all this is given so as to carry the living interest of the pupil with us, it can not be forgotten. Biography for the youngest, events for those a little older, and the connection of events

with what is called the development of the nation for those still older,-these would seem to be the natural steps toward a general and retainable view of history. But the greed for facts, the felt and fussy necessity of 'knowing' this and that and the other thing, drives us into the path of compression, so that, at last, every thing that has, and much that has not happened, is squeezed into the pages of the school history book. I have before me a 'complete' history of England, from the invasion of Julius Cæsar down to our late war in Abyssinia, which costs only a penny. It is called a text-book; but we all know very well that it is not so employed-that it is not used by the teacher to give narrative from and to base explanations upon; but that it is in daily use as a memory and a cram book. These and larger books have been rightly said 'to combine the respective disadvantages of the multiplication table and the Newgate Calendar, being little better than a list of dates and battles, enlivened by murders and other crimes, with a sprinkling of entertaining stories, most of which are now no longer regarded as authentic, and which we are taught first to believe and afterward to disbelieve.' I do not myself know what general impression-if any-the getting up of such books leaves upon the mind of the growing youth; but I should judge, from an examination I have made of several hundreds, that the half-conscious notion which settles in their heads is, that the government of God upon earth is a government of accident tempered by catastrophe. Now the chance of filling the heads and hearts of young persons with a knowledge of the best and constructive side of humanity, of firing them with a love of nobleness and goodness, of training them to self-sacrifice for the good of the State and of their fellow-men, is lost, and the spirit of history is extinguished by the demands of routine and drill, of encyclopædism and abridgment. A hortus siccus of dates and events, deaths and successions, battles and murders, -a dry and highly abstract calculus of historical series and constitutional epochs, out of which comes no inspiration, and into which can be put no sympathy, takes the place of a living and spoken narrative, to which children can listen for hours, to which they will listen when repeated in the very same words again and again, the gaps of which they will fill with that imaginative experience which exists in a more or less latent form in the mind of every child. Instead of this, he 'learns' the poor stuff that is given him in books; he can not hold it; it can not hold him; it will not combine with other knowledge, and when he leaves school, he quite comfortably gives it all up and forgets all

about it.

Let me take still another example; and I have the less hesitation in calling your attention to it, as what I have to say applies in this subject both to primary and to secondary instruction. There is a subject called Grammar, which fills a considerable amount of time in all our schools. There are also about seven hundred grammars of the English language in the South Kensington Museum, to show the teacher how to teach it, and to guide the pupil how to learn it. Of these seven hundred, most of which I have looked into, about six hundred and fifty are only expressions of private opinion regarding certain phenomena in our mother tongue; and they have no more value for a student of the philology of the English language than Mrs. Marcet's conversations on chemistry have for a modern student of that science. But we have to ask ourselves what purpose we have in teaching what is called Grammar? That purpose can only be one of three. Either it is (1) to teach the history, growth, and form of our own language, on the scientific basis of philology; or (2) it is to teach grammar as an introduction to literature, to the power of appreciating and enjoying the best writers; or it is (3) to furnish a certain kind of easy and agreeable training in elementary logic, in so far as that can be received from words. If the first be our object, we are very deficient in Great Britain, as the grammars in general use give no hint of the fact that our language had any history at all, and take no cognizance of the difference between the English of the present century and the English of the fourteenth or of the ninth. If it is the second purpose that is kept in view, we must lament the fact that elaborate preparations-in the form of parsing, analysis, rules of syntax, etymology, and prosody-are made; and when the pupil is thoroughly prepared to be ushered into the presence of the great masters of thought and expression, in the hope that he will form with some of them a life-long friendship, the introduction does not take place at all.

If a training in the art of thinking is our aim, it can not be denied that this is very useful, and there are good teachers who succeed admirably in it. But they are not assisted by the books. On the contrary, these books afford to the young student of logic his best and richest field for the hunt after logical errors; they contain, in rank profusion, every kind of blunder-cross-division, undistributed middle, imperfect induction, insufficient and inconvertible definition, and every other species of logical fallacy.

Now, this short review of the state in which three widely taught subjects are at present found, calls our attention to two important considerations. The first is the question, What influence can a university have upon teaching in schools? And the second is, How can such subjects as are at present taught in schools be best engineered?

The spirit and tendency of university teaching are to lead the student in science to Nature herself, and to show him how to interrogate her; in literature, to guide the student always to the best in thought and in expression, and to show him how to enjoy and to live in that. Copies or compilations, which contain a large proportion of the unauthentic, the second-hand, and the unverifiable, have no legitimate position, and can meet with nothing but temporary sufferance within the walls of a university. Now, it is this spirit which requires to be breathed into the whole of our primary and most of our secondary education. At present, the two diseases of both-and they are chronic diseases-are the appropriation by the memory alone of results apart from methods and processes, and the belief that we are acquainted with some work in literature, when we have neither appreciated it nor felt it, but only read about it and about it.

The second question involves in it the farther question, which I can only glance at here: What amount of abridgment is possible, necessary, and useful for the young learner? This question has never yet been asked; and yet it is of vital importance in primary instruction. If an abridged statement of facts is presented to grown up and thoughtful persons, they insist on knowing all the steps that have led to this abridgment; they have probably made themselves acquainted long ago with all the data which underlie and give reality to each general notion, and they are in a position to verify every item in the general view. But nothing of all this has been done by, or is possible for, the young learner, and we do not ask for it. Our old friend, the volitional memory, is at hand to help us, and into that illimitable tank all kinds of facts, data, conceptions, and representations are thrown, and the fermenting process is neither examined nor regarded.

The pressure of encyclopædism all over the country, both in primary and in secondary schools, is producing a most remarkable tendency, a tendency which is completely hostile to the true spirit of education. This tendency inspires pupil-teachers and other examinees to ask the question: What absolutely smallest amount of knowledge am I to compel myself to receive in order that I may force my way through the narrow gate of examination? And abridgment is at hand to make the process as dry and useless to him as it can be made.

2. The Tyranny of Books.

Another idolon schola—and one which it is time to dethrone, or at least to put down to a lower place-is the book. The tyranny of the book is felt from the farthest north to the extremest south of this island; and, paradoxical as it may seem, it is perhaps the greatest enemy to education, and to right conceptions of what education may be made, that we at present have. The popular notion of instruction in school always contains three factors-a Teacher, a Book, and the Learners; and the arrangement is the teacher behind the book, and the pupil in front of it, while the process-it is sometimes called a method-is to pour, in the readiest way that can be invented, the contents of the book into the memory of the pupil. And thus the true idea of education is obscured, and it is indeed in many of our schools in danger of being entirely lost; I mean the conception of education as the contact of living mind with living mind. Spiritual light and divine fire may, as we all know, be passed on by writings and books; but, for true education, are less often helps than obstructions. In the schoolroom they interfere to a large extent with the cheering sight of the first begin

ning and gradual growth of a new knowledge, with the bright interplay of question and answer, with the kindly hint and the shrewd guess, with the perpetual seeking and finding, with the hunt and the capture, with the constant correction of each other's bearings, with the coming to branching paths 'in the wanderings of careful thought,' with the sympathetic reception of truth and the collective enthusiasm for beauty.

3. Mechanical Methods.

The third 'peccant' humor which at present infects the body of education is the employment of Mechanical Methods. These methods were perhaps not at first mechanical; they have become so by degeneration in the hands of merely imitative persons. If a method is not thoroughly assimilated by the teacher, so as to become a living part of his own mind, if it does not marry itself willingly to his own thought and his own habits, if it is adopted as a mere plan for saving himself trouble, and for escaping from his usual amount of work, it has a tendency to degenerate into a kind of machine, into something that can not call forth thought and mental activity from his pupils.

Again, our schools try to cultivate the art of clear and adequate expression in speech and in writing. But, losing sight of the true end, and of the right means to that end, and having lost the inspiration of the vital force which creates the art, their attempts dwindle into a mere set of imitations and a code of petty rules, into the bastard arts of 'composition' on the one hand, and 'elocution' on the other; and young people are urged to acquire what is called a style without regard to the subject-matter they have to think about, or the soul that must give expression to the thought.

Once more, our mechanical methods blind us to the necessity of seeking to analyze our subjects in the fullest manner, and so to arrange the steps that the children may go up with ease and pleasure. We are constantly giving knowledge prematurely; we are every day anticipating results which the child will reach for himself; and all our pupils suffer in their brains from the malady of the day-imperfect digestion.

4. Didactic Teaching.

The fourth disease which is chronic in our modes of instruction is what may be best described as the Didactic Disease. It may seem strange to classify what looks like the essential condition of all teaching, or indeed as teaching itself, as the base and the enemy of it. But I employ the word didactic here to indicate two things, both of which are inconsistent with good and sound teaching. One is the presentation of results with subsequent analysis and explanations of them; the other is what goes by the name of telling, in opposition to eliciting or educing. Now, if a pupil can be led along the right path of induction, and arrive at these results by the motion of his own mind, the results remain with him for ever, and are a new power for the acquisition of more; whereas we never can be quite sure whether the pupil has appropriated, in a thorough-going and healthy way, the conclusions which were at first presented to him as such, and afterward explained and apologized for. Again, it is plain that knowledge given is one of those dangerous gifts which, in the language of Wordsworth, are not to be given,' and that, in this region also, the eternal law of value rules beyond contradiction. 'You must pay for every thing that which it is worth.' If you get your knowledge for nothing, it is worth exactly that and no more. In fact, there is no more room or ground of existence for didactic teaching than there is for didactic poetry. Both education and poetry are believed, and rightly believed, to be perpetually attended by delight and a healty up-building of the mental frame; both lose that healthy and edifying delight in exact proportion to the presence of the consciously didactic element. The process of giving on the one hand and taking on the other-the process of telling and listening, of learning by heart, repeating and hearing-this process goes on until the minds of both teacher and pupil are beaten hard like a macadamized road, and it would be as useful to cast fresh seed on the one as on the other. Wonder and curiosity and interest are left outside, waiting on the wrong side of the school door; and they have to wait there until they rejoin the child in the fields or by the river side.

A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

MEMOIR.*

A. BRONSON ALCOTT (whose father's name was written Joseph Chatfield Alcock, as was his grandfather Joseph Alcock, the first settler of Wolcott) was born on Spindle Hill, Wolcott, November 29, 1799. His father owned a farm of one hundred acres, which he tilled, with the help of his sons, in summer, and worked as a mechanic in making all sorts of farming tools and household utensils for his town folks in the winter, and intervals not occupied with his farming-living in a quiet, simple way with a wife of more than ordinary intelligence and character. The mother of our Concord philosopher, as he has been named from his residence in Concord, Mass., since 1830, was Anna Bronson, the daughter of Captain Amos Bronson, of Plymouth: a man of property, influence, and decided theological opinions, somewhat at variance with those of the majority of Connecticut farmers at that time. She was the sister of an eminent clergyman and scholar,-Dr. Tillotson Bronson, for some years at the head of the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, and previously rector of St. John's Church, in Waterbury. She had some advantages of culture not so common in Wolcott at that time, and at her marriage brought to the Spindle Hill neighborhood a refinement of disposition and a grace of deportment that gave a more polite tone to the little community. In course of time her husband and children joined her in the Episcopal form of worship, when introduced in their neighborhood, where the service was read (at the Spindle Hill school-house), until in course of time a church was gathered. She united steadfastness and persistency of purpose with uncommon delicacy and sweetness of spirit, and was truly, as her son declares her, 'meek, forgiving, patient, generous, and self-sustained, the best of wives and mothers.' She lived to a great age, surviving her husband more than thirty years.

From his earliest years Mr. Alcott was fond of books, and read

Abridged from Memoir by F. A. Sanborn, in Proceedings of the Centennial Celebration of the settlement of the town of Wolcott, in Connecticut, 1873.

This change in the spelling of the family name was made by the two cousins for the sake of euphony.

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