FREE-HAND DRAWING IN EDUCATION. 761 



The drawing in itself is of no consequence except as it stands 

 for the record of an exiiloration and discovery. The teacher, to 

 succeed, must be able at a glance to determine whether the child 

 is recording concept or percept. 



The result of training the child to explore, discover, and re- 

 cord is shown by the dotted line beginning at the eleventh year 

 on line 2 of large chart, ending at fourteenth year (No. 30). 

 This line is the history of a parochial school. The pupils had 

 thirty minutes' exercise a week for about thirty weeks a year up 

 to the first circle, from then on one hour a week for about thirty- 

 five weeks a year. The average rate of increase in power of ob- 

 servation equals maintaining the average rate from the ninth 

 to the tenth year, to the fourteenth ; twenty per cent above the 

 average of their age, ten per cent above the adult average. The 

 line beginning in a circle at the sixteenth year, ending at nine- 

 teenth year at No. 19, is the history of a high-school class under 

 the same drawing teacher as the above described. They received 

 four times the training (one hundred and eighty hours a year) 

 given the parochial school, and made, as the chart shows, exactly 

 the same increase in two years that the former compassed in 

 eighteen months. All the lines between these two are of classes 

 trained by the same drawing teacher and the same method ; the 

 numbers in which they terminate indicate the number of pupils 

 of which the circle is the center. 



Is it not possible that between the lines 30 and 19 we may 

 read the record of the atrophy suffered because of too much 

 instructing, by putting the child in possession of facts instead 

 of faculties, described by Dr. H. E. Armstrong, F. R. S., and in 

 the article * in which he also writes : " In the future all subjects 

 must be taught scientifically at school, in order to inculcate those 

 habits of mind which are termed scientific habits ; the teaching 

 of scientific methods not the mere shibboleths of some branch 

 of natural science " ? 



We see by the chart that the class that began to study draw- 

 ing as a science at eleven, at twelve and a half had reached 

 seventy-seven per cent, three and a half years in advance of the 

 later class ; they reached eighty-five per cent four years in ad- 

 vance of the (31) boys of the high-school class, and that at an 

 expenditure of one fourth the time. 



The value of this training is necessarily a matter of opinion. 

 The regular teachers of the classes shown on the chart at posi- 

 tions 29, 28, 33, 51, 39, 44, estimate that the one hour per week 

 exercise in drawing as a science study, by the reduction of time 

 required for a certain subject, makes the class of fourteen years 



* Popular Science Monthly, September, 1894. 



