8o2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



must give way to marching and conntermarcliing. In tlie school- 

 room questioning, judging, willing, and spontaneity in general 

 seem to be vested in the teacher alone, to be incompatible with 

 his idea of pupils' right thinking. The educational code there is, 

 ." Sit still, ask no questions, learn and recite your lessons, and do 

 what I tell you." This ancient code makes the conditions favor- 

 able for the application of questions assumed to be asked after the 

 Socratic method, in which as practiced the pupils' self-activities 

 appear to be very much overlooked. 



The universal method of teaching is catechetical, the teacher 

 asking all the questions and the pupils attempting to answer 

 them. The teacher sets the conditions and makes all the attacks 

 on ignorance, negligence, and incompetence, and may be said 

 truly to be on the offensive always ; while the pupils constantly 

 attempt to comply with conditions, repel attacks, and conceal 

 their shortcomings, and may be said as truly to be always on the 

 defensive. The mutual relations of teacher and pupils may be 

 quite accurately determined by averaging the conditions which 

 the graduates of various schools remember to have existed when 

 they went to school. How they outwitted the teacher forms a 

 bright spot in the memory. It is long remembered and easily 

 recalled. Like a good joke, it is delightfully piquant and suggest- 

 ive of similar jokes. 



The customary one-sidedness of teaching makes school work 

 more or less disagreeable and progress comparatively slow. It is 

 difficult to excite and sustain interest. Repression, coercion, and 

 machinery become necessary to make the government respected 

 and respectable. Strong disciplinarians rather than good teachers 

 are required when children's activities, either of body or mind, 

 are directed into hard, unnatural channels or are kept down by 

 forcible means. The teacher questions, struggles against the con- 

 stitution of her pupils' minds, and really dominates them at last. 

 Herbart says, " Tediousness is the greatest sin of instruction." The 

 pupils often feel that their work is uninteresting and difficult 

 without knowing why or how to help themselves ; and they learn, 

 often by bitter experience, that it is discreet to obey and learn 

 and recite their lessons, however distasteful they may be. That 

 is the traditional way — the way passed over by their parents, in 

 which they are expected to go, and by which the torrent of their 

 impulsive questions must needs be dammed up for many a long 

 year in the future as it has been for centuries in the past. Re- 

 pression is the word naturally and correctly applied to such a 

 system. 



Children's natural, constant, and almost irrepressible desire 

 to question freely about everything that comes within the range 

 of their experience has not been considered of any special value 



