mean that a
child of eight or nine years old can or should be made to see, judge,
and conclude upon new matters with the discovering and advancing power
of a philosopher. But he may be made to perform his own proper little
mental operations, no matter how small they are, on the same
principle,--on the principle of actual understanding, instead of mere
sole memorizing.

All my instructors, whether they meant to do so or not, did in fact
proceed as if they believed children's minds to be, not live fountains,
but empty cisterns; not to be capable of thought; like an empty house,
to be furnished for a tenant; needing to be fitted up with a store of
lifeless forms, which the adult life, when it came, was to breathe
vitality into and turn to living uses. I learned rules. "Here, little
boy," they said, "swallow these oyster-shells. They will lie naturally
and easily in your stomach until you grow up, because little boys'
stomachs are adapted for the storage of oyster-shells; and when you are
a man, and want oysters, put some in there." But does it stand to reason
that children, who manipulate words and figures, and produce results
without understanding the rules they apply,--just as a wizard's
apprentice could evoke his master's demons without knowing the meaning
of the awful syllables he recited, so that Southey's arcanum of
Aballiboozobanganorribo might respectably serve as one of them,--does it
stand to reason that these unhappy young jugglers will the better learn
to do the same work intelligently afterwards? No; for they have to
dislodge the bad habit which has pre-empted, before they can install the
good one. As well undertake to train a new Mozart by making the bright
little music-loving boy grind ten years on a barrel-organ with _La ci
darem_ in its bowels.

I remember a fondness for long, large, grown-up words; doubtless, in
some measure, a result of my constant practice of reading grown-up
people's books. It was a mere verbal memory, the driest of all the
intellectual faculties. Scarcely a faint perfume of meaning lingered
about the rattling piles of husks that I could say and spell.

What I learned at Sunday school and church was to be inexpressibly weary
of them. What I learned at home I can perhaps define but little better.
I gained no important result from any direct instruction. I gained
something of good-boy behavior and decent manners, diligently trained
into me. But what was most valuable in my home educat