of trying to give
some special skill in some handicraft, together with a few scraps of
knowledge in a certain branch of some science. And it has shown also
what can be obtained, without over-pressure, if a rational economy of
the scholar's time is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand
with practice. Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem
extraordinary at all, and still better results may be expected if the
same principles are applied from the earliest years of education. Waste
of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not only are we
taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is taught so as to
make us waste over it as much time as possible. Our present methods of
teaching originate from a time when the accomplishments required from an
educated person were extremely limited; and they have been maintained,
notwithstanding the immense increase of knowledge which must be conveyed
to the scholar's mind since science has so much widened its former
limits. Hence the over-pressure in schools, and hence, also, the urgent
necessity of totally revising both the subjects and the methods of
teaching, according to the new wants and to the examples already given
here and there, by separate schools and separate teachers.

It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent so
uselessly as they are now. German teachers have shown how the very plays
of children can be made instrumental in conveying to the childish mind
some concrete knowledge in both geometry and mathematics. The children
who have made the squares of the theorem of Pythagoras out of pieces of
colored cardboard, will not look at the theorem, when it comes in
geometry, as on a mere instrument of torture devised by the teachers;
and the less so if they apply it as the carpenters do. Complicated
problems of arithmetic, which so much harassed us in our boyhood, are
easily solved by children seven and eight years old if they are put in
the shape of interesting puzzles. And if the _Kindergarten_--German
teachers often make of it a kind of barrack in which each movement of
the child is regulated beforehand--has often become a small prison for
the little ones, the idea which presided at its foundation is
nevertheless true. In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine, without
having tried it, how many sound notions of nature, habits of
classification, and taste for natural sciences can be conveyed to the
children's minds