te to
the abstract. But regardless of this, highly abstract studies, such as
grammar, which should come quite late, are begun quite early. Political
geography, dead and uninteresting to a child, and which should be an
appendage of sociological studies, is commenced betimes; while physical
geography, comprehensible and comparatively attractive to a child, is in
great part passed over. Nearly every subject dealt with is arranged in
abnormal order: definitions and rules and principles being put first,
instead of being disclosed, as they are in the order of nature, through
the study of cases. And then, pervading the whole, is the vicious system
of rote learning--a system of sacrificing the spirit to the letter. See
the results. What with perceptions unnaturally dulled by early
thwarting, and a coerced attention to books--what with the mental
confusion produced by teaching subjects before they can be understood,
and in each of them giving generalisations before the facts of which
they are the generalisations--what with making the pupil a mere passive
recipient of other's ideas, and not in the least leading him to be an
active inquirer or self-instructor--and what with taxing the faculties
to excess; there are very few minds that become as efficient as they
might be. Examinations being once passed, books are laid aside; the
greater part of what has been acquired, being unorganised, soon drops
out of recollection; what remains is mostly inert--the art of applying
knowledge not having been cultivated; and there is but little power
either of accurate observation or independent thinking. To all which
add, that while much of the information gained is of relatively small
value, an immense mass of information of transcendent value is entirely
passed over.

Thus we find the facts to be such as might have been inferred _a
priori_. The training of children--physical, moral, and intellectual--is
dreadfully defective. And in great measure it is so because parents are
devoid of that knowledge by which this training can alone be rightly
guided. What is to be expected when one of the most intricate of
problems is undertaken by those who have given scarcely a thought to the
principles on which its solution depends? For shoe-making or
house-building, for the management of a ship or a locomotive engine, a
long apprenticeship is needful. Is it, then, that the unfolding of a
human being in body and mind is so comparatively simple a process that