we say that education is an affair of the laws of our being, involving a wide range of considerations-involving, in short, a complete acquaintance with corporeal conditions, which science alone can give—when we hint of these things, we seem to be speaking in an unknown tongue; or, if intelligible, then very irrelevant and unpractical.”

"The teaching method," says Professor Bain, "is arrived at in various ways. One principal mode is experience of the work this is the inductive, or practical, source. Another mode is education from the laws of the human mind: this is the deductive, or theoretical, source. The third and best mode is to combine the two; to rectify empirical teaching by principles, and to qualify deductions from principles by practical experience."

III. THE ART OF TEACHING.

"Art," says Professor Joseph Le Conte, "is the result, at first, of the empirical method; science always of the rational method. Art leads upward to the comprehension of science; but science, when sufficiently perfect, turns again and perfects art."

The art of school-teaching consists in the skilful application of the great body of rules and methods deduced from science, observation, experiment, and practice. In other words, the art lies in teaching according to laws based upon a scientific knowledge of the nature of the child to be instructed.

"Successful teaching," says Mr. Dickinson, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, "is the product of knowledge, skill, and experience. The teacher must have a good knowledge of the mind, of the facts he is to teach, of the sciences which rest upon them, and of the end to be

secured by school-work. He must have skill in applying his method, or he will fail to awaken right ideas, or he will do for the pupil what the pupil should do for himself, or he will talk too much, or spend time in teaching what is not worth knowing. He must have experience, or he will be liable to violate all the principles of good teaching in attempting to apply them."

It is an axiom in the art of teaching that it is what the child does for himself and by himself, under wise guidance, that educates him.

Now, the untrained and unskilled teacher, ignorant of the laws of mind, believes that children are educated mainly by what they are told, or by what they commit to memory from books. He fills all children to the brim with facts. Like Gradgrind and M'Choakumchild in Dickens, he seems "a kind of cannon, loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow the boys and girls clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge." His fetich is the school text-book. It is ugly, but he worships it, and makes his pupils bow down before it. To him the child has but one intellectual faculty, and that is memory. He enlists pain in his service, and drives his pupils by main force.

Mill says that, if there is a first principle in education, it is this: "That the discipline which does good to the mind is that in which the mind is active, not passive; the secret of developing the faculties is to give them much to do, and much inducement to do it." Tyndall says, "The exercise of the mind, like that of the body, depends for its value upon the spirit in which it is accomplished Spencer says, "The child should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible." But the unskilled teacher blunders along as if Mill, Spencer, Tyn

dall, Froebel, and Pestalozzi had never lived, thought, observed, discovered, and written. He recognizes no educational authority but himself. He teaches in the "good old way" handed down by imitation from the past-a "way" still perpetuated, not only in common-schools both in the city and country, but also in not a few high-schools and colleges.

Agassiz said the worst service a teacher could render a pupil was to give him a ready-made answer; but the schoolkeeper tells everything in advance. Spencer, Bain, Comenius, and other educators agree that in every branch of study the mind should be conducted to principles through the medium of examples, and so should be led from the particular to the general, the simple to the complex, the concrete to the abstract, the indefinite to the definite, the empirical to the rational or scientific. But the unscientific teacher violates all these rules. In arithmetic, he begins with definitions, continues in abstractions and mechanical rules, and ends in puzzling problems. In grammar, he omits the actual use of language in expressing thought, and devotes his attention to the technicalities of parsing and analysis. In geography, he is content to have his pupils memorize names regardless of ideas. In history, he strings dates like wooden beads upon the thread of memory. In reading, he trains pupils to call words without much reference to meaning. In botany, he takes books before flowers, and in physics omits experiments. Objectlessons he regards with disdain. In fact, he does not educate at all; that is, he does not draw out, train, and discipline; he does not awaken curiosity, nor excite inquiry, nor develop discrimination.

In view of the charlatanism and empiricism so wide

spread in methods of instruction, we may well be tolerant towards those who assert that there is, as yet, in our common-schools, neither an art nor a science of teaching. "Our schools," said Agassiz, "are the treadmills of knowledge, while they might be made the living sources of knowledge."

Mr. Dickinson, of Massachusetts, says, in his recent report, "The old methods of teaching are still generally practised. Lessons to be committed to memory are still assigned from books; and then the teacher, by question and answer, conducts the recitation."

A state superintendent, who had made, during a four years' term of office, hundreds of visits to country schools, recently stated that he never once saw a teacher conducting a recitation without a text-book in hand; that he seldom saw either teacher or scholar at the blackboard; that he never saw a school globe actually in use; that pupils seemed to know nothing of local geography, and when asked to point north, uniformly pointed overhead to the zenith; that he saw but one school cabinet; that he never saw a teacher give an object-lesson; and that he never found a school where pupils had been taught how to write a letter either of business or friendship.

An examiner in one of the ten largest cities of our country says that he found many classes of children in the primary department who, after attending school three years, had never made a figure or letter upon the blackboard; that oral lessons were copied into blank-books and memorized by pupils; that the school globe was used only to show that the earth is round; that most of the teaching consisted in hearing verbatim recitations; that in more than half the recitations written answers were

required; that pupils were worried by frequent written examinations; and that the anxiety of teachers seemed to be not to develop the faculties of pupils, but to get them through the annual official written examination into the next higher grade. This crude teaching was the result, partly of bad supervision, and partly of untrained teachers. Such work is the natural outgrowth of the popular notion "that anybody can keep school." And it is hopeless to expect that teachers who are ignorant of their own ignorance, who have grown wrongheaded from haphazard experience, and conceited from their narrow-mindedness, will ever become anything more than machine teachers, marking their pupils with a stencil-plate. It is this class of pedagogues that Carlyle has so graphically made immortal in the following paragraph :

"My teachers were hide-bound pedants without knowledge of man's nature, or of boys, or of aught save lexicons. Innumerable dead vocables they crammed into us, and called it fostering the growth of the mind. How can an inanimate mechanical verb-grinder foster the growth of anything, much more of mind, which grows, not like a vegetable by having its roots littered by etymological compost, but, like a spirit, by mysterious contact with spiritthought kindling itself at the fire of living thought! How shall he give kindling in whose own inward man there is no live coal but is burned out to a dead grammatical cinder? My professors knew syntax enough, and of the human soul this much-that it had a faculty called memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by the appliance of birch-rods."

The greatest waste of time and money in our schoolsystem comes from the employment of untrained teachers