no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



suited to the age and capacity of the child. (2) Book-learning 

 must be given up in the case of any child to whom it can not he 

 made pleasurable. (3) Prizes must not be given for success in 

 school-work, nor punishment for failure. (4) The natural love 

 that children have for games must be taken advantage of, so as to 

 cause a healthy development of the moral nature, the physical 

 powers, the imagination, etc. (5) The energies of the child must 

 be fully as well as harmoniously developed, and the child's growth 

 must not be stunted by too easy work. (6) A love of nature and 

 of all forms of beauty must be stimulated and encouraged. 



The difficulty of establishing a natural system of education is 

 much increased by the anxiety on the part of parents to see at 

 every point evidence of their children's progress. This natural 

 but inconvenient wish has prevented the Kindergarten system 

 from coming more generally into use, and unless parents can be 

 induced to place more confidence in the capacity and judgment of 

 teachers, it is to be feared that it will also prevent the introduc- 

 tion of improved systems of training for older children. In in- 

 specting schools for young children an examiner should make it 

 his business to find out whether they are being taught in the 

 right way, not whether they have reached a high standard of 

 book-knowledge. The latter is of little or no importance, the 

 former is all-important. We should not hear so many protests 

 against examinations if examiners knew how to do their work 

 rightly. At present examiners think it is their business to find 

 out what the children know, and so long as that is the case ex- 

 aminations will not be satisfactory. Are the children's minds in 

 a healthy state and are their faculties being drawn out in the 

 right way ? These are the questions that need attention. An ex- 

 amination should be so conducted as to avoid developing self-con- 

 sciousness and other morbid tendencies. "We want to teach the 

 children to be, not to seem. More freedom is needed both for 

 teachers and children. Perhaps it may not be thought safe to 

 grant the freedom ; that has often been the case in history, and yet 

 the grant of freedom has been generally justified by its results. 



Frequent examinations prevent natural growth. We do not 

 expect our gardeners to show us the roots of their growing plants. 

 A child's attention should be fixed if possible more on the subject 

 of study itself than on his own progress in it, and examinations 

 as they are now conducted are apt to prevent this. They are less 

 injurious to older children when an interest in the subjects them- 

 selves has been firmly established. But all examinations tend to 

 encourage the performance of work in order to show what one 

 can do, which is not a good motive for human conduct. It is 

 wholesome to work from interest in a subject, or in order to help 

 others, but not in order to show that we can do well, still less 



