Greek and Latin of the
masters, you may judge what that of the children is. Scarcely have
they learned by heart the rudiments, without in the least understanding
them, before they are taught to utter a French discourse in Latin
words; and, when further advanced, to string together in prose, phrases
from Cicero and cantos from Virgil. Then they imagine they are
speaking Latin, and who is there to contradict them?[12]

In any study, words that represent things are nothing without the ideas
of the things they represent. We, however, limit children to these
signs, without ever being able to make them understand the things
represented. We think we are teaching a child the description of the
earth, when he is merely learning maps. We teach him the names of
cities, countries, rivers; he has no idea that they exist anywhere but
on the map we use in pointing them out to him. I recollect seeing
somewhere a text-book on geography which began thus:

"What is the world? A pasteboard globe." Precisely such is the
geography of children. I will venture to say that after two years of
globes and cosmography no child of ten, by rules they give him, could
find the way from Paris to St. Denis. I maintain that not one of them,
from a plan of his father's garden, could trace out its windings
without going astray. And yet these are the knowing creatures who can
tell you exactly where Pekin, Ispahan, Mexico, and all the countries of
the world are.

I hear it suggested that children ought to be engaged in studies in
which only the eye is needed. This might be true if there were studies
in which their eyes were not needed; but I know of none such.

A still more ridiculous method obliges children to study history,
supposed to be within their comprehension because it is only a
collection of facts.[13] But what do we mean by facts? Do we suppose
that the relations out of which historic facts grow are so easily
understood that the minds of children grasp such ideas without
difficulty? Do we imagine that the true understanding of events can be
separated from that of their causes and effects? and that the historic
and the moral are so far asunder that the one can be understood without
the other? If in men's actions you see only purely external and
physical changes, what do you learn from history? Absolutely nothing;
and the subject, despoiled of all interest, no longer gives you either
pleasure or instruction. If you intend to est