tle patience, renders the movements easy,
but, after all, they are only automatic, or what the physicians call
reflex.

We have the same result produced in a less degree when we attempt to
teach an intelligent child something which is beyond his active
comprehension. A child may be taught to do or say almost anything by
patient training, but, if what he is to say is beyond the power of his
mental comprehension, and hence of his active assimilation, we are only
training him as we train an animal (Sec. 14), and not educating him. We
call such recitations parrot recitations, and, by our use of the word,
express exactly in what position the pupils are placed. An idiot is only
a case of permanently arrested development. What in the intelligent
child is a passing phase is for the idiot a fixed state. We have idiots
of all grades, as we have children of all ages.

The above observations must not be taken to mean that children should
never be taught to perform operations in arithmetic which they do not,
in cant phrase, "perfectly understand," or to learn poetry whose whole
meaning they cannot fathom. Into this error many teachers have fallen.

There can be no more profitable study for a teacher than to visit one of
these numerous idiot schools. He finds the alphabet of his professional
work there. As the philologist learns of the formation and growth of
language by examining, not the perfectly formed languages, but the
dialects of savage tribes, so with the teacher. In like manner more
insight into the philosophy of teaching and of the nature of the mind
can be acquired by teaching a class of children to read than in any
other grade of work.

_II.--The Form of Education._

Sec. 23. The general form of Education follows from the nature of mind.
Mind is nothing but what it itself creates out of its own activity. It
is, at first, mind as undeveloped or unconscious (in the main); but,
secondly, it acquires the power of examining its own action, of
considering itself as an object of attention, as if it were a quite
foreign thing--_i.e._, it reflects (in this stage it is really ignorant
that it is studying its own nature); and, finally, it becomes conscious
that this, which it had been examining, and of whose existence it is
conscious, is its own self: It attains self-consciousness. It is through
this estrangement from itself, given back to itself again and restored
to unity, but it is no longer a simple, unconscious unity. In