ELEVATING THE PROFESSION OF THE EDUCATOR. 121 



time, for of all those who are said to write a good school hand, the 

 greater part of them leave the faculty behind them and write ever 

 after a hand most fashionably illegible. Cyphering is made another 

 of the school nuisances, and has had as many sighs and tears poured 

 over it as the altar of Nemesis herself. The knowledge of Jigures 

 is but ill acquired for so much pain and labour, and usually ends in 

 a sort of running knowledge of the multiplication table, and an in- 

 distinct idea of the rule of three : were it not for the responsibility 

 and necessities which prompt the energies of men (in after life) to 

 acquire a better knowledge of these studies, there would remain but 

 the shadow of their existence. As to geography which might be so 

 pleasantly learned in a month, children's memories are filled with a 

 multitude of names of countries, provinces, capitals, towns, rivers, 

 &c., in fact, treading beetle-like from point to point over this vast 

 globe, that at last the memory presents a sort of chaos, a rude and 

 indigestible mass that is too insupportable not to be cast off and for- 

 gotten. The sciences, as botany, natural history, mineralogy, geolo- 

 gy and many others, are seldom named in the prospectus of the most 

 celebrated establishments. The only approach they make to these 

 studies is through the medium of some poor itinerant lecturer. 

 Those studies which could be taught in the green fields and forest 

 wild and wherever nature was to be seen, when the mind might be 

 questioned by the spirit of the universe, and the sports and joyous- 

 ness of childhood and youth, would receive a more exquisite delight 

 from the curious and ever new phenomena of nature, unfolded to 

 them through a master intellect all this is hidden from the inquisi- 

 tive and apt minds of youth, which if wisely and pleasantly inculca- 

 ted would fill the world with philosophers. School-masters and 

 parents coalesce in the annihilation of a noble and elevated spirit ; 

 for they both misapprehend the real object of school ; the teacher 

 must be a conformist to the prejudices of the parents, prejudices 

 which originate from their own individual circumstances, so that to 

 get on at school involves perhaps twenty different opinions with as 

 many parents, but which getting on is expressive of that tension 

 without substance that is quickly followed by an irrecoverable col- 

 lapse. But even with this liberal course of study that is to adapt 

 a thinking rational soul for the high purpose of its existence, in its 

 relation to God and man, the moral department is sunk to a few 

 conventional rules, or hushed up in the quietizing specific of " reli- 

 gious formalities." Nearly all our pupils (says the prospectus of 

 one of the most celebrated schools in England) belong to the esta- 



VOL. X., NO. XXVIII. 16 



