640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



forgotten their own sufferings in the spelling-class, can not see that 

 children are so very much perplexed in learning to spell, or perhaps 

 maintain that the struggle involved is "good for them." 



" I know," says Max Mtiller, " there are persons who can defend 

 anything, and who hold that it is due to this very discipline that the 

 English character is what it is ; that it retains respect for authority ; 

 that it does not require a reason for everything ; and that it does not 

 admit that what is inconceivable is therefore impossible. Even Eng- 

 lish orthodoxy has been traced back to that hidden source, because 

 a child accustomed to believe that t-h-o-u-g-h is though, and that 

 t-h-r-o-u-g-h is through, would afterward believe anything. It may 

 be so ; still I doubt whether even such objects would justify such 

 means. Lord Ly tton says : ' A more lying, roundabout, puzzle-headed 

 delusion than that by which we confuse the clear instincts of truth in 

 our accursed system of spelling was never concocted by the father of 

 falsehood. . . . How can a system of education flourish that begins 

 by so monstrous a falsehood, which the sense of hearing suffices to 

 contradict ? ' " 



Here is a chief source o the incapacity for thinking which acade- 

 my and college students bring into the science laboratories. This irra- 

 tional process, taken up when the child enters school, occupying a 

 large share of his time, and continued for six or eight years, has a 

 powerful influence in shaping his plastic mind. When at last he is 

 allowed to take up the study of nature, at the wrong end of his school 

 course, what wonder that he sits with folded hands, waiting to be told 

 facts to commit to memory, that he can not realize what a law is, and 

 does not know how to use his reason in obtaining knowledge ? Ra- 

 tional education will never flourish as it should till a reformation in the 

 teaching of reading and spelling has been accomplished. Further, Mr. 

 J. H. Gladstone, member of the English School Board for London, has 

 computed the number of hours spent by children in learning to read 

 and spell English to be 2,320, while, in gaining an equal knowledge of 

 their native language, Italian children spend only 945 hours. The dif- 

 ference amounts to nearly two school years, and shows under what a 

 disadvantage English-speaking children labor. Can any one believe 

 that 4,923,451, or 13-4 per cent, of our population over ten years of 

 age would be illiterate if learning to read were not so formidable an 

 undertaking ? In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and some 

 German states, there are hardly any illiterates. 



The most striking testimony to the irregularity of our spelling is 

 the adoption by some teachers of a sort of Chinese mode of teaching 

 reading. The children are not taught that letters represent constitu- 

 ent sounds of words, but they learn to recognize each group of letters 

 as an arbitrary compound symbol standing for a word. This is more 

 of a dead drag on the memory than even the A-B-C method, and, if it 

 could be completely carried out, would be a vastly longer process. 



