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to sinners; in the sufferings and death of Christ; of the obedience and love which led him to submit to these sufferings and this death; of the favor which he has procured for us; of the ordinances which he has instituted in remembrance of his death; of the great rewards and terrible punishments of eternity, &c. Your emotion will manifest itself in your exterior deportment; it will render your words impressive, and will awaken like emotions in the hearts of your auditors. A simple tear which may start in the eye of the master, and which is not the effect of art, but the involuntary expression of a heart truly softened and penetrated by the importance of the subject, acts very powerfully on the hearts of children, and often produces in them impressions and resolutions which the most lively representations could not have effected.

5. By active compassion for the misfortunes of your neighbors, you can excite in the children pity, and teach them the right manner of sympathizing with their fellow creatures, in joy and in adversity.

Your manner of conducting yourself toward your pupils, will contribute much toward making them either courteous and charitable men, or morose and indifferent to their duties. If you act toward them as a good father; if all your conduct shows them your love; that you labor with all your power for their real good, and to be useful to them as much as possible; and (because you love them) that you willingly render them services, and procure pleasures for them, (which may be often in themselves the merest trifles,) you will awaken in many of them, love, and the desire to oblige, for love is contagious. They will learn also fron you, to render voluntary service to their companions and to others; this will be the result of your example. In a word, each virtue will appear to them more amiable, and more worthy of being imitated; and you will be more sure than ever, that they will seek to acquire it, if it be manifest in your conduct.

Oh, you can do much, yes, very much, to form the hearts of your pupils, if you will instruct them at the same time by your life and by your precepts. The best of opportunities is offered to you; they are confided to your care precisely at the age when the instinct of curiosity and imitation acts with the greatest force; when you have them daily with you, and can thus instill gradually according to their capacity, good doctrines and good sentiments. A drop which falls incessantly wears the hardest stones; and much more easily can impressions be made on the unformed characters of children. The faults which perhaps they may have when you enter into relation with them, are not so deeply rooted that they can not be removed, if you give to the work attention and zeal. You can really produce more substantial good in their hearts, than their pastors can at a more advanced age. To destroy rooted vices is a difficult task, and often impossible to be accomplished, whatever efforts may be tried; but to prevent them, to stifle them in their commencement, to fashion the mind when it is still pliant; this is a much easier work, and one which, by the blessing of God, will succeed, if the master teach by his actions, as well as by precept. Do not shrink from the task; it is the most noble, the most respectable, the most imposing that you can undertake.

Do not allow yourself to be frightened or arrested in a work so excellent, by the difficulties which it presents, many of which exist only in your imagination. The duty to which I now exhort you, that of leading a life irreproachable and edifying before God and before the children, is a duty obligatory upon you as Christians; it ought to be of importance to you even if you should not be schoolmasters; but as such, as directors of youth, who are to be formed by your teaching and by your example, you are doubly engaged to this duty.

If, then, you love yourselves; if you love these little ones confided to your care, and placed under your responsibility; if you love Him who is their Saviour and yours, follow also his example on this point, teaching like him by words and actions; be to your pupils on all occasions," a pattern of good works." (Titus ii. 7.) your light so shine before them, that they, seeing your good works, may do likewise, and with you, glorify your Father who is in heaven."

"Let

We add a few suggestions in the same spirit by Zeller, and Beckendorf-translated from "Le Miroir des Instituteurs, ou Conseils sur l' Education."

XIII. THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION.

BY HERBERT SPENCER.

(Continued from page 512, No. XXVII.)

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III. INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AND STUDIES.

DESIRE OF OLD METHODS.

1. The suppression of every error is commonly followed by a temporary ascendency of the contrary one; and it so happened, that after the ages when physical development alone was aimed at, there came an age when culture of the mind was the sole solicitude-when children had lesson-books put before them at between two and three years old-when school-hours were protracted, and the getting of knowledge was thought the one thing needful. As, further, it usually happens, that after one of these reactions the next advance is achieved by co-ordinating the antagonist errors, and perceiving that they are opposite sides of one truth; so we are now coming to the conviction that body and mind must both be cared for, and the whole being unfolded. The forcing system has been in great measure given up, and precocity is discouraged.. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life, is to be a good animal. The best brain is found of little service, if there be not enough vital energy to work it; and hence to obtain the one by sacrificing the source of the other, is now considered a folly—a folly which the eventual failure of juvenile prodigies constantly illustrates. Thus we are discovering the wisdom of the saying, that one secret in education is "to know how wisely to lose time." The once universal practice of learning by rote, is daily falling more into discredit. All modern authorities condemn the old mechanical way of teaching the alphabet. The multiplication table is now frequently taught experimentally. In the acquirement of languages, the grammar-school plan is being superseded by plans based on the spontaneous process followed by the child in gaining its mother tongue.

Along with rote-teaching, is declining also the nearly allied teaching by rules. The particulars first, and then the generalization, is the new method-a method, as the Battersea School Reports remark, which, though "the reverse of the ⚫ method usually followed which consists in giving the pupil the rule first,” is yet proved by experience to be the right one. Rule-teaching is now condemned as imparting a merely empirical knowledge-as producing an appearance of understanding without the reality. To give the net product of inquiry, without the inquiry that leads to it, is found to be both enervating and inefficient. General truths to be of due and permanent use, must be earned. Easy come easy go," is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth. While rules, lying isolated

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in the mind-not joined to its other contents as outgrowths from them—are continually forgotten, the principles which those rules express piecemeal, become, when once reached by the understanding, enduring possessions. While the rule-taught youth is at sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a new case as readily as an old one. Between a mind of rules and a mind of principles, there exists a difference such as that between a confused heap of materials, and the same materials organized into a complete whole, with all its parts bound together. Of which types this last has not only the advantage that its constituent parts are better retained, but the much greater advantage, that it forms an efficient agent for inquiry, for independent thought, for discovery-ends for which the first is useless. Nor let it be supposed that this is a simile only: it is the literal truth. The union of facts into generalizations is the organization of knowledge, whether considered as an objective phenomenon, or a subjective one: and the mental grasp may be measured by the extent to which this organization is carried.

From the substitution of principles for rules, and the necessarily co-ordinate practice of leaving abstractions untaught until the mind has been familiarized with the facts from which they are abstracted, has resulted the postponement of some once early studies to a late period. This is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. As M. Marcel says:-"It may without hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument." As Mr. Wyse argues:"Grammar and Syntax are a collection of laws and rules. Rules are gathered from practice; they are the results of induction to which we come by long observation and comparison of facts.

INTRODUCTION OF NEW METHOD.

2. After long ages of blindness men are at last seeing that the spontaneous activity of the observing faculties in children has a meaning and a use. What was once thought mere purposeless action, or play, or mischief, as the case might be, is now recognized as the process of acquiring a knowledge on which all after-knowledge is based. Hence the well-conceived but ill-conducted system of object-lessons. The saying of Bacon, that physics is the mother of sciences, has come to have a meaning in education. Without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful. "The education of the senses neglected, all after education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency which it is impossible to cure."

While the old method of presenting truths in the abstract has been falling out of use, there has been a corresponding adoption of the new method of presenting them in the concrete. The rudimentary facts of exact science are now being learnt by direct intuition, as textures, and tastes, and colors are learnt. Employing the ball-frame for first lessons in arithmetic exemplifies this. It is well illustrated, too, in Professor De Morgan's mode of explaining the decimal notation. M. Marcel, rightly repudiating the old system of tables, teaches weights and measures by referring to the actual yard and foot, pound and ounce, gallon and quart; and lets the discovery of their relationships be experimental. The use of geographical models and models of the regular bodies, &c., as introductory to geography and geometry respectively, are facts of the same class. Manifestly a common trait of these methods is, that they carry each child's

mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through. The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learnt them. By-and-by, perhaps, it will be seen that he can not possibly learn them in any other way; for that if he is made to repeat them as abstractions, the abstractions can have no meaning for him, until he finds that they are simply statements of what he intuitively discerns.

But of all the changes taking place, the most significant is the growing desire to make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable rather than painful—a desire based on the more or less distinct perception that at each age the intellectual action which a child likes is a healthful one for it; and conversely. There is a spreading opinion that the rise of an appetite for any kind of knowledge implies that the unfolding mind has become fit to assimilate it, and needs it for the purposes of growth; and that on the other hand, the disgust felt towards any kind of knowledge is a sign either that it is prematurely presented, or that it is presented in an indigestible form. Hence the efforts to make early education amusing, and all education interesting. Hence the lectures on the value of play. Hence the defense of nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. Daily we more and more conform our plans to juvenile opinion. Does the child like this or that kind of teaching? does he take to it? we constantly ask. "His natural desire of variety should be indulged," says M. Marcel; "and the gratification of his curiosity should be combined with his improvement." "Lessons," he again remarks, "should cease before the child evinces symptoms of weariness." And so with later education. Short breaks during school-hours, excursions into the country, amusing lectures, choral songs-in these and many like traits, the change may be discerned. Asceticism is disappearing out of education as out of life; and the usual test of political legislation-its tendency to promote happiness-is beginning to be, in a great degree, the test of legislation for the school and the nursery.

THE ORDER AND METHOD OF NATURE TO BE FOLLOWED.

3. There is a certain sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain this sequence, and supply this knowledge. A nebulous perception of it now prevails among teachers; and it is daily more insisted on in educational works. "The method of nature is the archetype of all methods," says M. Marcel. "The vital principle in the pursuit is to enable the pupil rightly to instruct himself,” writes Mr. Wyse. The more science familiarizes us with the constitution of things the more do we see in them an inherent self-sufficingness. A higher knowledge tends continually to limit our interference with the processes of life. As in medicine the old "heroic treatment" has given place to mild treatment, and often no treatment save a normal regimen as we have found that it is not needful to mould the bodies of babes by bandaging them in papoose fashion or otherwise-as in gaols it is being discovered that no cunningly devised discipline of ours is so efficient in producing reformation as the natural discipline, the making prisoners maintain themselves by productive labor; so in education we are finding that success is to be achieved only by rendering our measures subservient to that spontaneous unfolding which all minds go through in their progress to maturity.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION.

4. Though it is not possible for a scheme of culture to be perfected either in matter or form until a rational Psychology has been established, it is possible, with the aid of certain guiding principles, to make empirical approximations towards a perfect scheme. To prepare the way for further research we will now specify these principles:

(1.) That in education we should proceed from the simple to the complex is a truth which has always been to some extent acted upon; not professedly, indeed, nor by any means consistently. The mind grows. Like all things that grow it progresses from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; and a normal training system being an objective counterpart of this subjective process, must exhibit the like progression. Moreover, regarding it from this point of view, we may see that this formula has much wider applications than at first appears. For its rationale involves not only that we should proceed from the single to the combined in the teaching of each branch of knowledge; but that we should do the like with knowledge as a whole. As the mind, consisting at first of but few active faculties; has its later-completed faculties successively awakened, and ultimately comes to have all its faculties in simultaneous action; it follows that our teaching should begin with but few subjects at once, and successively adding to these, should finally carry on all subjects abreast-that not only in its details should education proceed from the simple to the complex, but in its ensemble also.

(2.) To say that our lessons ought to start from the concrete and end in the abstract, may be considered as in part a repetition of the foregoing. Nevetheless it is a maxim that needs to be stated: if with no other view, then with the view of showing in certain cases what are truly the simple and the complex. For unfortunately there has been much misunderstanding on this point. Gen. eral formulas which men have devised to express groups of details, and which have severally simplified their conceptions by uniting many facts into one fact, they have supposed must simplify the conceptions of the child also: quite forgetting that a generalization is simple only in comparison with the whole mass of particular truths it comprehends—that it is more complex than any one of these truths taken singly-that only after many of these single truths have been acquired does the generalization ease the memory and help the reasonand that to the child not possessing these single truths it is necessarily a mystery. Thus confounding two kinds of simplification, teachers have constantly erred by setting out with "first principles:" a proceeding essentially, though not apparently, at variance with the primary rule; which implies that the mind should be introduced to principles through the medium of examples, and so should be led from the particular to the general-from the concrete to the abstract.

(3.) The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind as considered historically; or in other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race.

It is alike provable that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. Not to specify these causes in detail, it will suffice here to point out that as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to

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