IV AND WHERE TO FIND IT 87 



Wliere is there any approximation to it? Has any 

 one tried to found such an education? Look- 

 ing over the length and breadth of these islands, 

 I am afraid that all these questions must re- 

 ceive a negative answer. Consider our primary 

 schools and what is taught in them. A child 

 learns — 



1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less 

 well; but in a very large proportion of cases not so 

 well as to take pleasure in reading, or to be able to 

 write the commonest letter properly. 



2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which 

 the child, nine times out of ten, understands next 

 to nothing. 



3. Mixed up witli this, so as to seem to stand 

 or fall with it, a few of the broadest and simplest 

 principles of morality. This, to my mind, is much 

 as if a man of science should make the story of the 

 fall of the apple in Newton's garden an integral 

 part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it 

 as of equal authority with the law of the inverse 

 squares. 



4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian 

 geography, and perhaps a little something about 

 English history and the geograi^hy of the child's 

 own country. But I doubt if there is a primary 

 school in England in which hangs. a map of the 

 hundred in which the village lies, so that the chil- 

 dren may be practically taught by it what a map 



means. 



6G 



