t is easy and not
unpleasant to work in a routine. Schiller used to say that he found the
great happiness of life to consist in the discharge of some mechanical
duty. He was in the right. Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness
of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not
mechanical. Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the
multiplication of photographs from the teacher's negative, or, in the
words of Richter, "to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble
copies of the same pedagogue type." But the parent's office demands
courage,--courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of
thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago.
The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead
of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery.
Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that "scholastic
grossness of barbarous ages" from which we nineteenth-century citizens
have by no means escaped. "We do amiss," exclaims the eloquent scholar,
"to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable
Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in
one year." He denounces this "misspending our prime youth at schools and
universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things
chiefly as were better unlearned." We quote the words of Milton rather
than those of other eminent men to the same effect, because the poet
cannot be accused of objecting to Latin and Greek taught at the right
time and in the right way. A man whose mighty English was always fast
anchored to classic bottoms had surely no sentimental preference for
modern sciences. Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at
present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient
languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton
realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and
perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal
memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We
hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming
centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the
precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able
to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives
to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is
capable of assimilat