MANUAL OR INDUSTRIAL TRAINING. 399 



trained pupil would be more helped toward that end by bis 

 schooling than a scientist has been helped hitherto by the old 

 routine. But if this be admitted, a considerable change of the 

 present curriculum must follow. Thus, foreign languages in our 

 public schools are, in the best of cases, a mythical adornment, 

 nothing else. In exchange for the money spent for it, the amount 

 of actual philological information is very small. The only avail- 

 able part of such instruction would be conversational ability, 

 which of course can not be wisely expected as the result of the 

 few half -hours in the week, because the detached grammatical 

 particles of a lacerated foreign idiom most assuredly can not pro- 

 duce the least earthly good, and do often interfere as a bad mixt- 

 ure with the purity of our English. Equally so with geography 

 and history. Taught as they are, they could with equal benefit 

 be left out of the curriculum. 



Geography is either the most valuable branch to the teacher 

 or the most valueless for teacher and pupil both. If used as the 

 great co-ordination means for a thorough instruction in elements 

 of natural history, botany, geology, etc ; if taken conjointly with 

 the instruction in elementary knowledge about terrestrial atmos- 

 pheric forces and their activities ; if united to general informa- 

 tion on the elements of history, beginning with some conception 

 about man, his occupations, nature, etc. — then geography in the 

 hands of a skillful teacher is the branch, is, so to say, the mne- 

 monic key of general information, as without localization any in- 

 formation is of questionable value. But if representing simply 

 detached memory exercises of so and so many hundreds of foreign 

 names, etc., sure to be forgotten before the pupil is through with 

 the book, then, of course, it is waste of time. 



History also falls within the same criticism. " We are a law- 

 making people here in America," says one of our educational 

 lecturers ; " we have to learn how to make laws " ! Very poor 

 article indeed. Fewer laws, so much the better, as every law 

 exemplifies a shortcoming ; but would it not be preferable, if one 

 wants absolutely to make laws, to begin to study, not how to 

 make them, but what a law is ? Thus with history. If once the 

 pupil could command something like a fair, honest information 

 and understanding of what society is, of what his own circle is, 

 his borough, his county, his State, their institutions, etc., with 

 some elements of civil government, then of course he could trace 

 the various historical reasons for the present institutions, have a 

 rational idea of his own country as a standard, and compare it 

 with others, but then only would he be ready for history ; other- 

 wise the couple of dates and stereotyped versions about the cour- 

 age of the good Putnam and the cowardice of the English, the 

 ideality of the North and the blackness of the South, etc., will be 



